





, # 
























A^ T>. 






, ; 






to o' 












^ ^. 






ENGLISH 3WEN OF LETTERS 

JEREMY TAYLOR 






ENGLISH 3\£EN OF LETTERS 



JEREMY TAYLOR 



EDMUND GOSSE 



LONDON: MACMILLAN &■ CO., LIMITED 
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FOUR 






Copyright in the United States of America, 1903 



PREFATOKY NOTE 

This volume contains a conscientious attempt to 
present for the first time a detailed biography of 
Jeremy Taylor. It is remarkable that the career of 
so eminent and so beloved a writer should not have 
attracted more attention from literary historians. But 
its incidents were neglected during the lifetime of 
those who could have remembered him, and were not 
made the object of inquiry until external evidence 
could no longer be obtained. The Funeral Sermon, 
published by George Eust, Bishop of Dromore, in 1668, 
is a document invaluable to the biographer, but it 
stands alone. Some particulars were added by 
Anthony a Wood, and some by Harris in his 1746 
edition of the Works of Sir James Ware, who however 
died before Jeremy Taylor. 

In the eighteenth century several efforts were made 
to collect notes for Taylor's memoirs, in particular by 
George Home, Bishop of Norwich, and then by Thomas 
Zouch, the antiquary, but these were abandoned for 
lack of material. In 1793, to a volume of selections, 
Wheeldon prefixed a Life, which is a mere paraphrase 
of Rust, and is without independent value. The 
a 2 v 



vi JEREMY TAYLOR 

Rev. Henry Kaye Bonney was the first to succeed 
in making original researches, which he used in his 
memoir of Jeremy Taylor published in 1815. This 
book, however, is inadequate and untrustworthy, and 
no one became more conscious of its defects than 
Bonney himself, who set himself to correct it, and 
who, when he heard that Heber was engaged in 
editing Jeremy Taylor, generously withdrew his book 
from circulation, and placed his corrections and fresh 
information in Heber's hands. 

Every student of Jeremy Taylor owes a debt of 
gratitude to Reginald Heber, afterwards Bishop of 
Calcutta, for his edition of the text and for his careful 
commentary. He worked at the former when he was 
vicar of Hodnet, Salop, and he finished it just before 
he went out to India. The Works appeared in 1822, 
in fifteen volumes, and contained a Life which threw 
a flood of new light over the biography and biblio- 
graphy of Jeremy Taylor. As was inevitable, however, 
in surveying a tract of literary history so long and so 
completely neglected, Heber's narrative contained a 
large number of misstatements, and he was moreover 
the victim of a mystification which will presently be 
referred to. His exile in India, and his premature 
death, prevented any revision of his valuable work. 
Meanwhile, J. S. Hughes, in 1831, prefixed to a 
selection from Taylor's Works a Life that has no 
biographical value. But in 1847 the Rev. Robert 
Aris Willmott, of Bearwood, published a very graceful 



PREFATORY NOTE vii 

little book entitled Bishop Jeremy Taylor, his Pre- 
decessors, Contemporaries, and Successors, a sketch of the 
English Church in the seventeenth century, in the 
course of which he corrected Heber in some particulars, 
and added one or two fresh facts. 

All these biographies were superseded, however, by 
the labours of the Eev. Charles Page Eden, fellow of 
Oriel, and vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, who undertook 
the complete revision of Heber's Jeremy Taylor. His 
edition of the Works, which was in ten volumes, and 
occupied several years, was completed in 1854 by 
what was called volume i., which contained Heber's 
Life of Jeremy Taylor, corrected, enlarged, and sup- 
pb' ?d with voluminous notes. Eden was a fine scholar, 
and he must have been one of the most modest of 
men, for he concealed the importance of his work 
under the guise of a loyal fidelity to Heber. He is, 
therefore, scarcely named by the bibliographers, yet 
it is no more than justice to point out that it is 
his recension of Heber's memoir, very inconveniently 
arranged, indeed, being cumbered with notes and 
appendices, and hidden away in the midst of other 
editorial matter, which forms the only authoritative 
biography of Jeremy Taylor. 

Since Eden's day, no Life of Taylor has been issued 
which can be named as having any independent value. 
For the collection of documents and quotation of 
authorities, his still remains the one entirely indis- 
pensable publication dealing with the career of the 



viii JEREMY TAYLOR 

Bishop. But, in the course of the fifty years which 
have elapsed since Eden put down his pen, the history 
of the seventeenth century has been greatly elucidated. 
At various points his narrative needs to be enlarged 
and corrected in detail, and it is with no sentiment but 
one of gratitude to Eden, and admiration of his 
scholarship, that the writer of this volume feels that the 
time has arrived for a more minute, and a more con- 
secutive biography of Jeremy Taylor. In particular, 
the labour of Ulster church antiquaries has discovered, 
and has published in various fugitive forms, a great 
deal about the Bishop's Irish experiences which could 
not be known to Heber or to Eden. These have been 
well used in the short summary of Taylor's life, con- 
tributed by the Rev. T. B. Johnstone to the Dictionary 
of National Biography. 

It is necessary, however, to speak of an element in 
the biography of Jeremy Taylor which has hitherto 
been accepted in every account of his life, and which 
I have slowly and reluctantly been obliged to reject. 
When Heber was collecting material for the 1822 
edition, he was favoured with some manuscripts which 
he described as "among the most interesting hitherto 
recovered concerning Bishop Taylor's private con- 
cerns." They purported to be the papers of William 
Todd Jones of Homra, who had been occupied all his 
life, so it was averred, in collecting documents for a 
biography of Jeremy Taylor, from whom he was 
lineally descended "in the fifth degree." Mr. Jones 



PREFATORY NOTE ix 

died suddenly, in 1818, by being thrown out of his 
carriage, when all his notes and manuscripts were 
found to have absolutely vanished. In a mysterious 
way, however, some of them, and particularly remin- 
iscences said to have been contained in a letter written 
in 1732 by a Lady Wray, said to have been a grand- 
daughter of Jeremy Taylor, were eventually placed in 
Heber's hands. Heber did not print them verbatim, 
probably because he saw that in many particulars it 
was impossible that they could be correct. Many of 
the statements which he did pass were quietly ex- 
punged later on by Eden, who evidently could not 
tell what to make of Lad}^ Wray. But many more 
have hitherto been repeated, until they form part of 
Taylor's accepted biography. 

In very careful examination of what remains of 
Lady Wray's reminiscences, I have gradually come to 
the startling conclusion that they are apocryphal, and 
my narrative is accordingly deprived of some romantic, 
but ridiculous incidents. In one or two cases I have 
shown the accepted story to be preposterous ; in others 
I have simply dropped it out of the record. This 
is not the place to examine the whole of this curious 
and disconcerting business of Lady Wray's pretended 
traditions, but I hope elsewhere to do so in detail. 
I have no doubt left in my own mind that the whole 
thing was a mystification or hoax, by which Heber was 
deceived. The probable origin of this strange fraud it 
is perhaps too late to conjecture, and it is always 



x JEREMY TAYLOR 

possible that the letter of May 31, 1732, may have 
existed, and may even have been written in good faith, 
though in that case with a recklessness of ignorance 
positively amazing. For practical purposes, it is time 
that it should cease to be quoted among authorities 
for the biography of Jeremy Taylor. 

E. G. 

October 1903. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Childhood and Youth 1 



CHAPTER II 
The Civil War 24 

CHAPTER III 
Retirement at Golden Grove 66 

CHAPTER IV 
Years of Affliction 106 

CHAPTER V 

PORTMORE 148 

CHAPTER VI 
Dromore . 184 

CHAPTER VII 
Taylor's Place in Literary History . . . .211 



Index 



JEEEMY TAYLOE 

CHAPTEE I 

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 

(1613-1642) 

Regarding the ancestry of Jeremy Taylor much has 
beeD conjectured but little is known. During the 
seventeenth century no suggestion was made that his 
parentage had been other than obscure and simple. 
But in 1732 his granddaughter, Lady Wray, is sup- 
posed to have stated that the family held a respectable 
rank among the smaller gentry of Gloucestershire, 
'where they had possessed for many generations an 
estate in the parish of Frampton-on-Severn. ' There 
has been no confirmation of this statement ; but another 
pretension of Lady Wray's has proved irresistible by all 
Jeremy Taylor's biographers, although close examina- 
tion shows it no less devoid of basis. She said that 
Nathaniel Taylor, the father of the bishop, 'was the lineal 
descendant of Dr. Rowland Taylor,' the martyr. This 
is so delightful a supposition that no one has opposed 
it j and Heber even found ' a filial fondness ' in the way 
in which Jeremy speaks of Rowland in An Apology 
for Liturgy. He praises him enthusiastically, it is 
true, but it would be hard if we were supposed to 
A 



2 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

claim kinship with all of whom we write in terms of 
admiration. 

If Nathaniel Taylor was ' the lineal descendant ' of 
Cranmer's famous chaplain, who was burned at the 
stake, by Bonner's command, in 1555, he could only 
have been his grandson, and Edmund Taylor, the 
churchwarden, must have been one of Eowland Taylor's 
four surviving children. But if the relationship was 
so close — and dates forbid our making it more remote 
— how are we to explain the fact that in the discreet 
Cambridge household, where three generations worked 
humbly side by side, the glory of descending so recently 
and directly from a prominent local celebrity was not 
sedulously claimed'? We may, I am afraid, depend 
upon it that if Jeremy Taylor had been the great- 
grandson of the martyr, it would not have been left 
to Lady Wray to be the first to inform us. But Taylor 
himself seems to lay a vague claim to gentility. He 
used a seal with the arms ' Ermine, on a chief, indented, 
sable, three escallops, or : the crest a lion rampant, 
issuant, ermine, having between his paws a ducal 
coronet, or ' : these are also engraved on his portraits. 
This is the coat confirmed to a certain Roger Taylor, 
in 1614, but by what right the bishop assumed it, if 
he did so, remains quite unknown. In 1651 he asked 
Dugdale for information about this coat of arms, but 
we know not what reply the antiquary made. Where 
conjectures are so prevalent, I wonder that no one has 
sought to find a tie between the barber's son and the 
eminent Dr. Thomas Taylor, who was standing 'as a 
brazen wall against popery,' and teaching Hebrew at 
Christ's College, within a stone's-throw of Nathaniel 
Taylor's shop, all through the boyhood of Jeremy. 



I.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 3 

When gifts and graces abound so signally as they did 
in the person of the Bishop of Down and Connor, it 
is only human to suppose that they must be inherited. 

Jeremy Taylor sprang from a respectable Cambridge 
family of the lower middle class. His grandfather, 
Edmund Taylor, had been churchwarden of the parish 
of Trinity, certainly since 1589. The churchwarden's 
son Nathaniel married Mary Dean in 1605, and they 
had six children, of whom the subject of this memoir 
was the fourth child, and the third son. According 
to tradition, the house in which the Taylors lived was 
that later known as the Black Bull, 1 opposite Trinity 
Church, and here doubtless Jeremy Taylor was born. 
About the date of this event an uncertainty rests. 
Hu was baptized on the 15th of August 1613, but it 
was found to have been suggested by his Irish con- 
temporary, Sir James Ware, in his posthumous papers, 
that Taylor was, really, at least two years old at 
the time. The immediate reason for such a supposi- 
tion will presently appear ; but it must be said at once 
that to accept it would be to dislocate the whole 
record of Jeremy's brothers and sister, who appear on 
the registers at regular intervals of two years. From 
earliest infancy the future bishop seems to have been 
singularly precocious. His father, Nathaniel Taylor, 
was a barber by trade. There is no evidence that he 
belonged to the higher grade of barber-surgeon; but 

1 In his Virgidemiarum of 1597, where Joseph Hall celebrates 
twelve leading hostelries of Cambridge as symbolical of the 
signs of the Zodiac, he includes the Black Bull and the 
Wrestlers, both afterwards identified with Jeremy Taylor. 
This may be the 'creeping into every blind taphouse,' for 
which Milton reproves Hall. 



4 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

lie was a man of education, and the son was 'solely 
grounded in grammar and mathematics ' by his father. 

Early in the childhood of Jeremy Taylor, Dr. Stephen 
Perse, a fellow and bursar of Caius College, who had 
large landed property in Cambridge, died, leaving a 
will by which his town and college were generously 
benefited. Among other charges, his executors were 
directed to buy certain grounds and tenements on 
which to erect a convenient free grammar school for 
the use of a hundred scholars. The original Perse 
School, which existed until about sixty years ago, and 
stood in what was called Luthburne Lane, where the 
Cavendish Laboratory now stands, was finished and 
opened in 1619, and its first master was Thomas Lover- 
ing, a graduate of Pembroke College. Hither, and to the 
teaching of this excellent master, who was said to make 
learning so attractive to his pupils that they became 
" Minerva's darlings," Jeremy Taylor passed at the age 
of six; he was probably one of the original scholars 
when the grammar school was opened. About 1621 
the barber and his family moved to a house afterwards 
known as the Wrestlers' Inn, in Petty Cury, a few 
doors from their earlier home, and a little nearer the 
Perse School. 

Jeremy Taylor spent seven years at school, and then 
proceeded to G-onville and Caius College, where he was 
admitted as a sizar on the 18th of August 1626. Here 
we are confronted with a puzzle, for the admission- 
book states that he was at the time in the fifteenth 
year of his age. As a fact he could but very recently 
have entered his fourteenth. The book goes on to 
prove itself of slight authority in the matter of dates, 
by saying that Jeremy had attended the Perse School 



I.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 5 

for some ten years, whereas that institution had been 
in existence for no more than seven. We may dis- 
regard these erroneous entries, merely noticing that 
the rumour of Taylor's being older than he supposed 
is doubtless founded upon them, and upon the miracle 
of his precocious scholarship, for he was ripe for the 
university before custom would allow of his admittance. 
Rust, his faithful friend and earliest biographer, cor- 
rectly records that he entered college as soon as he was 
thirteen years of age. 

In leaving school, Jeremy Taylor did not deprive 
himself of the patronage of Stephen Perse. There had 
of late years been a great expansion of the University 
of Cambridge and a corresponding lack of accommoda- 
tion. By his admirable will, Dr. Perse relieved that 
pressure so far as his own college was concerned, by 
founding six fellowships and six scholarships, and by 
leaving money to build lodgings and chambers for the 
holders of these, and for many other persons. In 1617 
the Perse buildings rose on the north side of the 
entrance-court of the college, on ground which Perse 
had bought from Trinity. The beautiful symbolism 
of the gates of Caius — which was destroyed and 
rendered absurd by the manipulations of 1869 — was 
still in full force. When Jeremy Taylor came from 
the barber's shop in Petty Cury, across the Market 
Place and by St. Mary's, he would enter, as a youthful 
sizar should, at the Gate of Humility (which then 
opened into what is now Trinity Street, opposite St. 
Michael's Church), and would turn to the right across 
Brick Court. The building, which was his home from 
1626 until 1635, was one of the most agreeable in the 
university. Dr. Perse's bequest had been ample, and 



6 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

the new chambers were roomy and convenient. There 
were two stories, containing sets of studies, and oaken 
staircases led up to a third story of garrets or, as they 
were called, "excelses." The chambers looked out on 
St. Michael's Lane in front ; at the back, across Brick 
Court, to the Gonville buildings and to the chapel, 
which was being enlarged just when Jeremy Taylor 
finally left college. On either side the light fell 
through casements, provided with good Burgundy 
glass in small, well-soldered lozenges. All was com- 
fortable, in the simple sense of the time; even the 
excelses, in one of which Taylor doubtless found his 
first lodging, were well equipped. 

Of the nine years which the future bishop spent at 
college we know little. Within the local circle his 
grace and tact and earnestness won the admiration of 
his companions. We are told that the impression he 
produced was such that "had he lived among the 
ancient pagans he had been ushered into the world 
with a miracle, and swans must have danced and sung 
at his birth." He was "a great hero" in the ranks of 
college scholarship, and was looked upon as " no less 
than the son of Apollo, the god of wisdom and elo- 
quence." His tutor was Thomas Batchcroft, a strong 
royalist, who became Master of the college, and was 
ultimately ejected by the Parliamentarians. To his 
teaching we may attribute Taylor's earliest leanings to 
the king's cause. The boy's progress was steady and 
rapid: he matriculated on the 17th of March 1627, 
was elected a Perse scholar at Michaelmas of the follow- 
ing year, took his degree early in his eighteenth year, 
and was elected a Perse fellow at the age of twenty. 
He was a man, Eust tells us, long before he was of 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 7 

age, and had known "of the state of childhood little 
more than its innocency and pleasantness." 

In the course of his Liberty of Prophesying, Jeremy 
Taylor Temarked, twelve years after he left college, 
that "education is so great and so invincible a pre- 
judice, that he who masters the inconvenience of it is 
more to be commended than he can justly be blamed 
that complies with it." His own career was a com- 
ment on this passage. No one was ever more incon- 
venienced than he by the prejudice of that education 
which he received at Cambridge, and few have tried 
more manfully to master it. But the very narrow circle 
of minds among whom he was trained at college were 
filled with the passion of prerogative government in 
Church and State, and the duty of upholding it by all 
the apparatus of applied patristic literature. In a 
less intellectual and more physical sense, the laborious 
youth of Taylor presents itself to us as repressed 
within such limits as are now not endurable by an 
agricultural labourer. From the barber's shop in Petty 
Cury to the Perse School, thence to Caius College, and 
thence back to the shop, this is a round which can be 
calmly made in fifteen minutes, yet it comprises all we 
know of the first twenty years of the life of Jeremy 
Taylor. During the greater part of his college career, 
Milton, George Herbert, Fuller, Crashaw, and Henry 
More were inmates of the same university. Jeremy 
Taylor may well have brushed against the sleeves of 
each of them as he passed along the narrow streets 
of Cambridge. But not one of their lives touched his ; 
not one thought of theirs diverted him for a moment 
from his solitary course of study. 

An accident broke up the stillness of Taylor's seques- 



8 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

tered life, and flung him into the world. In 1633, 
being below the canonical age, he took holy orders, 
and in 1634 became a master of arts. His chamber- 
fellow (the usual arrangement was that two graduates 
slept in large beds in the outer chamber of each set 
of rooms, in the company of two scholars in smaller 
beds, which in the daytime were pushed out of sight 
below the larger), a Eev. Thomas Eisden, three years his 
senior, was engaged as a preacher at St. Paul's. Being 
prevented from carrying out his duties, Risden per- 
suaded Jeremy Taylor to go up to London and preach 
in his place. It is evident that the younger man must 
already, perhaps in the college chapel, have proved his 
aptitude for public speaking, since at Michaelmas 1634 
he was appointed by the Master to be prselector in 
rhetoric. At all events, he proceeded to St. Paul's in 
Risden's place and preached on successive occasions "to 
the admiration and astonishment of his auditory." His 
success was instantaneous, and his sermons the sensa- 
tion of the moment; it became the fashion to go to 
hear this young Mr. Taylor from Cambridge. We are 
told that "by his florid and youthful beauty, and sweet 
and pleasant air, and sublime and raised discourses, he 
made his hearers take him for some young angel, newly 
descended from the visions of glory." No one had 
preached in this way since the divine Dr. Donne, 
occupant of that very pulpit, had died three years 
before. 

We have in all probability reached the autumn of 
1634, and the opening of Jeremy Taylor's twenty-second 
year. He had now the fatal fortune of attracting the 
favour of the most powerful and the most unlucky 
man in England. The fame of the new star, that 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 9 

already "outshone" all the rest of the ecclesiastical 
firmament, came to the ears of Laud, and Jeremy 
Taylor was commanded to preach before his Grace. 
If Laud had questioned the reports which had reached 
him, he doubted no longer. He frankly recognised the 
genius of the astonishing youth with wonder and satis- 
faction. Among all Laud's faults, a disdain of learning 
and subtlety has never been enumerated; he set himself 
at once to draw music from an instrument so delicate 
and rich, and already attuned so carefully to the note 
of prerogative. This was a critical time in Laud's 
career; since August 1633 he had been Primate of 
England, and the threads of the whole ecclesiastical 
system were in his hand. He was at length enabled 
by vigorous administration of the ecclesiastical law 
to treat the extreme section of the Puritans with 
unmitigated severity. He was drawing the cords of 
discipline with more and more angry impatience 
around every limb of the unfortunate English Church, 
and those who resisted him had to fly, as best they 
might, to Holland, to Maryland, or to Massachusetts. 

For the next two years we know nothing of the 
fortunes of Jeremy Taylor, except that he lived under 
the protection and guidance of Laud. Rust has pre- 
served a pleasant anecdote of the youth's early con- 
versation with his patron. The archbishop, after 
hearing him preach, very graciously admitted that his 
"discourse was beyond exception," and even "beyond 
imitation." But "the wise prelate thought him too 
young," and indeed twenty-two years is but a modest 
age for a divine. Jeremy Taylor proved his wit, and, 
if we consider the circumstances, his courage, by reply- 
ing that he humbly begged his Grace to pardon that 



10 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

fault of youth, and promised "if he lived he would 
mend it." It is certain that Laud was greatly pleased 
with him, and there is no reason to believe that his 
favour ever nagged. It has been often said that Laud 
could not appreciate geniality in others, yet he recog- 
nised it in Juxon and in Taylor. Perhaps it would be 
safer to say, that he neither appreciated it nor heeded 
it in those whose views in any measure differed from 
his own, but it seems as though he recognised the 
importance of graceful manners in men who were 
zealously employed in his work. 

This year, 1635, marked the height of Laud's suc- 
cess. Without imagination or the power of looking 
forward, ignorant of the mainsprings of human action, 
led on by the desire to do what in his contracted 
earnestness he deemed to be right, at whatever cost to 
himself or others, the abyss was already opening before 
him. But he had little conception of it. He thought 
that he was conquering all along the line of opposition, 
warding off Rome on the one hand, crushing Puritan 
nonconformity on the other. In the glorious task he 
had set himself, he needed aiders and abettors. He 
could not begin too early to train labourers for his 
vineyard. Fresh Juxons and Wrens and Montagus 
must be trained to carry on the irresistible policy of 
Thorough ; where there was any splendour of talent 
and virtue in the English Church it must be captured 
young, and be shielded from caprice. Two years were 
to pass before it was brought home to that stubborn 
and rigorous nature that he might fail in his purpose, 
and might drag down in his fall those institutions of 
monarchy and Episcopacy which he loved so sincerely. 

Meanwhile the juvenile Jeremy Taylor was but one, 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 11 

even if the most brilliantly gifted, of the youthful 
divines of promise whom it was the archbishop's duty 
to train for the work of repression and reform. We 
do not know whether Laud permitted him to return 
to Cambridge, or whether he brought him to London ; 
Taylor did not vacate his fellowship at Caius College 
until Lady Day 1636. Laud's admiration of the young 
man's genius did not blind him to his immaturity; and 
the '\voung angel, newly descended from the visions 
of glory," required careful training in the more mun- 
dane and instant parts of ecclesiastical discipline. To 
the prosaic mind of Laud, it is not at all certain that 
the ecstatic dream, the coloured reverie of Taylor, 
would greatly appeal. He would admire it, no doubt, 
and love the holy and charming young proficient, but 
he would see a danger in it. The great thing was the 
cause of Thorough. In this was Taylor sound ? 

The answer to this question must be that, so far as 
we can discern, Taylor was absolutely sound. He had 
none of the spirit of a revolutionary ; his nature, 
reverential and timid, accepted the authority before him 
without question. It is not impossible that the arch- 
bishop took Taylor with him on those metropolitan 
visitations which he had lately started. It is certain 
that he found him, at present, too rhetorical and 
imaginative for his practical purposes, and decided, in 
language which betrayed an affectionate pride in so 
candid and docile a disciple, that it was "for the ad- 
vantage of the world, that such mighty parts should 
be afforded better opportunities of study and improve- 
ment than a course of constant preaching would allow 
of"; he determined that Taylor should settle at 
Oxford. It has been thought surprising, and compli- 



12 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

mentary neither to the learning nor the loyalty of 
Cambridge, that Laud should have chosen for this 
purpose the other university. But this shows a failure 
to comprehend the special meaning attached by the 
archbishop to * ; study and improvement." What 
Laud designed was that Taylor should enter the circle 
at Oxford which was being carefully prepared as a 
forcing-house for the ideas which alone seemed salu- 
tary to his bitter pertinacity of purpose. 

So completely had one society in Oxford become 
the centre of Laud's system of propaganda, that Paist 
actually says that at this juncture the archbishop 
placed Jeremy Taylor "in his own college of All Souls 
in Oxford,'' although, of course, in the exact and usual 
sense, Laud was not even a member of that college. 
On the 23rd of October 1635, he wrote from Lambeth 
to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls recommending 
to them "Mr. Jeremiah Taylor,'' as "an honest man 
and a good scholar," and heartily praying that he 
should be elected to the fellowship left vacant by the 
enforced retirement of a Mr. Osborne, for whom Laud 
provided elsewhere. It appears from the archbishop's 
letter, that Taylor had already been incorporated into 
Oxford, with an ad eundem degree, at I'niversity 
College. Laud writes in his customary dictatorial 
tone, and it is certain that formal difficulties presented 
themselves, Gilbert Sheldon, the Warden of All Souls, 
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, protesting 
against the high-handed procedure of Laud in this 
delicate matter. Jeremy Taylor, however, after a 
hurried and probably final visit to Cambridge, presented 
himself at Oxford, and was inspected by the fellows of 
All Souls. Thev fell under his irresistible charm, and 



L] CHILDHOOD AXD YOUTH 13 

pronounced him "a person of most wonderful pans. 
and like to be an ornament " to their society. The 
formal difficulty was avoided by holding no election, 
but Laud, in his right as visitor of the college, nomi- 
nated his protege to the vacant probationary fellowship 
at All Souls on the 3rd of November 1635, the society 
being "almost unanimous" in welcoming him. On 
the 14th of January 1636, he was admitted a "true 
and perpetual fellow " of the college. 

Here, then, for two years we have to think of him. 
sedately preparing for the work which seemed to lie 
before him, and learning, as Anthony a TVood says. 
what would "enable him to write casuistic-ally." His 
native eloquence and fancy were checked during this 
period of preparation in the school of Thorough. It 
was another Aj\ ■." m that his impetuous patron 

wished him to produce, and not a Holy Dying or a 
Exemplar. Laud took care not to lose sight of 
him : he made the young divine his chaplain, and 
doubtless often summoned him to Lambeth, that he 
might observe the growth of his mind and strengthen 
his resolution. 

Several interesting men are known to have come 
into contact with Jeremy Taylor during his early 
years at Oxford. His intimacy with Franciscus a 
Saneta Clara was close, and the memory of it developed 
after his departure into an Oxford legend. Saneta 
Clara, whose real name was Christopher Davenport, 
a man of many pseudonyms, was a missionary friar, 
who had lately arrived from Douai. He was a subtle 
and highly adroit personage, whose aim in life was to 
reconcile the English Church with Koine, and to do so 
bv the gentlest and most insinuating of flatteries. lie 



14 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

conciliated society with success ; the king became more 
than tolerant to Sancta Clara ; the queen took him as 
her chaplain; he grew intimate with many of the 
Anglican bishops, and Laud himself was afterwards 
accused by the Puritans of encouraging him. In 
slightly later years than we have yet reached, the 
graceful Franciscan pervaded Oxford, carrying with 
him a purpose of courtly casuistry and insidious en- 
croachment. That he paid particular attention to the 
youthful fellow of All Souls, and was careful to culti- 
vate his conversation, was a proof of the signal promise 
already given by the nature of Jeremy Taylor. 

A more interesting acquaintance offered itself to 
Taylor at Oxford. On arriving there, he found the 
university animated by the presence of a spirit of 
wonderful brightness, and a conscience personally dis- 
interested to a rare degree, but fretful, litigious, and 
violently swayed by every wind of doctrine. This was 
the extraordinary William Chillingworth, Laud's god- 
son, who had gone over to Rome, and had actually 
retired for a time to the Jesuits' college in Douai, but 
who, in 1631, had been turned again, by Laud's corre- 
spondence, from "a doubting Papist into a confirmed 
Protestant." A wavering and sceptical judgment, re- 
lentlessly lighted by what was doubtless the acutest in- 
tellect at that time applied in England to ecclesiastical 
matters, Chillingworth's love of dialectic for its own 
sake was so pronounced, that it was a jest in Oxford 
that he might be seen hurrying up and down in Trinity 
Garden, searching for somebody to dispute with. Thus 
Chillingworth had gone in and out, seeking rest and 
finding none. Laud, who admired him, and humoured 
him with signal patience, was doubtless pleased that 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 15 

his younger and more docile friend should sharpen 
his wits against the keenest intelligence in Oxford. 
And by 1636, Chillingworth was already partly calm- 
ing himself in the preparation of his own great and 
famous book. 

We have an interesting glimpse of Taylor in one 
of Chillingworth's letters of this time, written during 
an absence from Oxford, in which he begs his corre- 
spondent, or Mr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Coventry, to 
tell Jeremy Taylor that "one that knows him" — that 
is Chillingworth himself — has been heard to "magnify 
him exceedingly for other things, but censure him for " 
one, namely his inattention to the reasonings of others. 
This keen observer, who had been greatly impressed 
by the young divine's ability, was nevertheless struck 
by his neglect of the arguments of his opponent ; 
"methinks," says Chillingworth, "he wants much of 
the ethical part of a discourser, and slights too much 
many times the arguments of those he discourses with." 
Taylor was, in fact, far more of a rhetorician than of a 
casuist, just as in later years he was to be rather a 
religious man of letters than a logical theologian. But 
the terms of Chillingworth's letter, in which he begs 
his friend to delay his admoniti?~ long enough to 
prevent Taylor from suspecting who his critic is, and 
to be candid with the utmost gentleness, prove the 
high affection and esteem which Taylor inspired. At 
his own college, we are told, "love and admiration still 
waited upon him," and the appreciation of his "extra- 
ordinary worth and sweetness'' was universal. No 
doubt, had Chillingworth spoken directly to Taylor 
about his want of interest in argument, his young 
friend would gently and gaily have returned the parry. 



16 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

We know that the dialectic of Oxford churchmen 
seemed dry enough to him in later years, as he looked 
back with a smile to the days when he listened to 
"persons of great understanding oftentimes so amused 
with the authority of their church, that it is pity to 
see them sweat in answering some objections, which 
they know not how to do, but yet believe they must, 
because the church hath said it." A description of 
Chillingworth, too, seems to have hitherto escaped 
notice in the labyrinths of Taylor's Dudor DuHtantium : 
"I knew a scholar once who was a man of a quick 
apprehension, and easy to receive an objection, who 
when he read the Roman doctors was very much of 
their opinion, and as much against them when he read 
their adversaries ; but kept himself to the religion of 
his country, concerning which at all times he remem- 
bered that there were rare arguments and answers 
respectively, though he could not then think upon 
them." 

With his twenty-fifth year, Taylor's period of proba- 
tion came to a close. Laud was satisfied with the success 
of his experiment, and gave the faithful disciple his first 
rewards. The year 1638 was critical in Taylor's career. 
Laud determined on one of those complex shiftings by 
which he encouraged his followers, and was vigilant in 
pulling up those weeds of Puritan disaffection which 
the soil of England was now "too apt to nourish." 
The valuable incumbency of Uppingham, in Rutland- 
shire, had been held since 1631 by Dr. Edward Martin, 
President of Queens' College, and one of Laud's most 
faithful supporters at Cambridge, ultimately Dean of 
Ely. Martin never resided at Uppingham, where the 
duty was performed by his curate, Peter Hausted, 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 17 

a small dramatist of some note, author of The Rival 
Friends. Laud, acting in the name of Juxon, who, now 
that he was Lord High Treasurer, left these questions 
of minor preferment to his friend and chief, trans- 
ferred Martin to another rich sinecure, that of Hough- 
ton Conquest, in Bedfordshire, and on the 23rd of 
March 1638 instituted Jeremy Taylor to Uppingham. 
Taylor was not inclined to leave his duties to be per- 
formed by a curate, and Peter Hausted, who had 
proved himself a zealous High Churchman, was made 
rector of Much Hadham in Herts; he died a little 
later, in the dark year 1645, fighting at the siege of 
Banbury. 

Taylor made Uppingham his principal place of 
res'dence for about four years, during which time 
the entries in the parish books testify to the zeal 
with which he carried out his duties as rector. The 
quiet of the country life, far from the wordy contests 
of Oxford, was a great consolation to his spirit. He 
was now, for the first time, able to cultivate the 
things that he loved best, the reading of the Scrip- 
tures, and the methods by which the contemplative 
spirit can suck most sweetness from that honeycomb, 
namely, as he says himself, industry, meditation, con- 
ference, the human arts and sciences, and whatever 
" God and good news " offer as a reward for intellectual 
service. Of Taylor's experiences at Uppingham we 
know very little ; doubtless there was not much in his 
sequestered habits to record. One little vignette we 
possess, like a peep through the chink of a door. 
Mrs. Edward Turner of Little Dalby, though a parson's 
wife, was on her road to Eome, when she consulted 
Jeremy Taylor at Uppingham. He took her into his 



18 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

study, and "did enjoin her penance''; when she saw, 
and in spite of her tendencies was shocked at the sight, 
a little altar with a crucifix upon it. The anecdote 
probably dates from about 1640. 

The conjectures of the scandalised Mrs. Turner 
must be taken for what they are worth, but it seems 
certain that about this time Jeremy Taylor, like so 
many of the partisans of Thorough, like their tremend- 
ous leader himself, was suspected of a tendency to 
Popery. It was difficult to hold the straight high 
path between the zealots and Rome. The very stiffen- 
ing against Puritans made the English priest natur- 
ally lean towards ritual, until, as the egregious John 
Bastwick said, in 1637, the Church became "as full of 
ceremonies as a dog is full of fleas." 

Taylor's main intellectual centre was still at Oxford, 
where on the 5th of November 1638 he was appointed 
to preach at St. Mary's before the University on the 
anniversary of Guy Fawkes's Day. Wood gives an 
account, evidently by hearsay, of the circumstances 
which attended the delivery of this sermon. If we 
are to believe him, Taylor had no free hand in the 
composition of his address, which the vice-chancellor 
first commanded him to prepare, and then enlarged 
with many passages of his own, offensive to the Roman 
Catholics, so that after preaching it Taylor had to 
apologise to his Roman friends, and express his regret 
at the opinions which had been put into his mouth. 
Wood's authority for some of these statements was 
Sancta Clara, who told him that Jeremy Taylor had 
"several times expressed some sorrow for those things 
he had said." The subtle Franciscan was not to be 
trusted, and if Wood had heard Taylor's sermon, or 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 19 

had read it, he would hardly have repeated these 
remarks. The whole address bears the mark of one 
mind and one voice. There is every probability, 
indeed, that the gracious divine, meeting his Roman 
acquaintances in Oxford, and being reproached with 
his attack on them, would cautiously deprecate the 
idea of any personal unfriendliness. Further than this 
it is impossible that he could go. The terms in which 
he afterwards assures us that at no moment of his life 
was he tempted to acquiesce in the Roman doctrine 
are too explicit to be overlooked. 

The Sermon on Gunpowder Treason is the earliest 
composition of Taylor's which we possess. It is not 
a sermon in the modern sense, but a dissertation on 
a noint of ecclesiastical law casuistically treated ; some- 
thing, we may say, between a lecture by the Dixie Pro- 
fessor and a Hulsean Lecture. It is dedicated, in a 
strain of excessive modesty, to Laud ; and the preacher 
states that the Vice-Chancellor had commanded "a 
publication of these very short and sudden meditations." 
He speaks as one whose arguments against Rome had 
long attracted the notice of the authorities, until the 
university had been drawn to appoint him its " public 
voice " in a discovery of the king's religious enemies 
as well as in its " thanksgiving " to Laud himself. So 
far from attacking the Romanists, the author expresses 
a lively wish not to seem uncharitable, and, indeed, it 
is hard to tell how Sancta Clara, or Panzani himself, 
could reasonably object to a word in the dissertation. 
The Sermon on Gunpowder Treason is not doctrinal : it 
is entirely directed to one legal point, the assumed 
right of rebellion against heretical princes ; and the 
Jesuits at Oxford would have been crazy to complain 



20 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

of an official Anglican divine for resisting this particular 
assumption of theirs. 

The style of this address is dry and crabbed, with 
that incessant quotation from Latin authorities which 
was at that time so dangerous a vice of English prose. 
In only a single instance does it rise above the common- 
place level of the ecclesiastical jurisprudence of the 
hour. Near the close we find one paragraph which 
prophesies of the coming greatness of the writer : — 

" Now after such a sublimity of malice, I will not instance 
in the sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which 
needs must have perished in the flame, nor in the disturbing 
the ashes of our entombed kings, devouring their dead ruins 
like sepulchral dogs. These are but minutes, in respect of 
the ruin prepared for the living temples." 

These are clumsy phrases and halting cadences, but 
here we see at least, trying his undeveloped wings, the 
cygnet that was to become so proud and magnificent 
a swan. 

Jeremy Taylor was now settled in a rising fame as 
well as fortune ; assured of the favour of the party in 
power, he had a right to expect rapid and high pro- 
motion. He proceeded to form for himself a family. 
Towards the end of his tutorial work at Caius College, 
he had taught a medical student, Edward Langsdale, 
the son of a London gentleman. There was great 
sympathy between the teacher and the pupil, who 
was but six years his junior, and the relation ripened 
into a lifelong friendship. Edward Langsdale, who 
outlived the bishop, became a physician at Gains- 
borough, and on the 27th of May 1639 Jeremy Taylor 
married his sister, Phoebe, at Uppingham. Of Phoebe 
Taylor we know nothing, save that she bore her husband 



I.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 21 

six (if not seven) children, and that she died during the 
time of their retirement in Wales; a son, William, 
having died at Uppingham in May 1642. There has 
been useless speculation as to the reason of Phoebe 
Taylor's obscurity, but she was doubtless a simple 
and house-abiding matron of whom there would be 
little to record and no one to retail it. Jeremy Taylor 
was somewhat reserved under his sweetness. We 
know, from An Apology for Liturgy, that he did not 
love to discuss his household affairs; he was one of 
those who " will be so desirous of their liberty as to 
preserve that in private, when they have no concern- 
ments but their own, for matter of order or scandal." 
Such faint indications as we possess point to an un- 
ruled domestic felicity. 

Four years now pass in which we are unable to 
catch a glimpse of Taylor further than what the formal 
registers of Uppingham and All Souls College have to 
offer us. In his parish work he was " a rare conductor 
of souls, and knew how to counsel and to advise, to 
solve difficulties, and determine cares, and quiet con- 
sciences." In all this pleasant labour he was certainly 
happier than in exercising the casuistry which his visits 
to Oxford forced upon him. Nor did he spare his 
too passionate colleagues the lambency of his humour, 
comparing "their subtilties and spinosities" to the 
feats of Don Quixote. He " would make sport some- 
times with the romantic sophistry and fantastic adven- 
tures of school-errantry." It seems that he was slow 
to perceive the gathering storm of cloud. But when 
his great patron and the mainstay of his fortunes fell, 
he must have been stricken with alarm. In February 
1641 Laud was impeached by Sir Harry Vane ; on the 



22 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

1st of March he was sent to the Tower ; on the 25th 
of June he ceased to be Chancellor of Oxford. A 
little later all his rents and profits as Primate were 
sequestered. These were fatal dates in the career of 
Jeremy Taylor. " I am robbed of that which once did 
bless me," he wrote, and all the house of his hopes 
must have come crashing about his head. 

It does not appear that he had hitherto recognised 
in the Puritans a serious danger. He had paid them 
little attention ; his thoughts and arguments had been 
centred on the advances of Home. No doubt he con- 
sidered that Laud and Juxon were perfectly well able 
to keep the " sectaries " in order. But against the 
policy of Thorough had arisen that of Root-and-Branch, 
and the harshness of the bishops had brought about its 
equally violent reaction. It was probably not until 
1641 that Taylor realised that the discipline of Juxon 
and the authority of Laud had been strained beyond 
bearing, and that, in fact, they were going to be 
borne no longer. The scheme of church-government, 
in implicit obedience to which the whole of Taylor's 
placid youth had been spent, suddenly passed from 
the offensive to the defensive attitude. He could 
disregard the Puritan advance no longer ; he had to 
join his brethren in resisting its obtrusive energy, 
step by step. For that great contention was now to 
be fought out to a definite issue, which the wise poet, 
Samuel Daniel, had foreseen so long before, when he 
wrote, in his Musophilus : — 

" Sacred Religion, mother of form, and fear, 

How gorgeously sometimes dost thou sit decked ! 
What pompous vestures do we make thee wear ! 
What stately piles we, prodigal, erect ! 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 23 

How sweet perfum'd thou art ! How shining clear ! 
How solemnly observ'd, with what respect ! 

Another time, all plain, all quite threadbare, 
Thou must have all within, and nought without ; 

Sit poorly without light, disrob'd, no care 
Of outward grace to amuse the poor devout ; 

Powerless, unhallowed, scarcely men can spare 
The necessary rites to set thee out." 



CHAPTER II 

THE CIVIL WAR 

(1642-1649) 

At the breaking out of the Civil War, in the summer 
of 1642, Jeremy Taylor's name ceases to appear in the 
registers of Uppingham, nor does it recur there later. 
He was now chaplain-in-ordinary to the king, and in 
all probability he joined the troops when the standard 
was raised close by him, at Nottingham (August 22). 
The rectory at Uppingham doubtless continued for 
some twelve months more to be occupied by his 
family, since it was their legal home, and there was 
no species of personal danger imminent to them there. 
Moreover, no attempt was made to sequester the 
living until May 1644. Charles I. left Nottingham 
for Shrewsbury in September, and then proceeded 
in a south-eastern line direct for Oxford, which, after 
the indecisive engagement at Edgehill, he reached 
at the end of October. We may be certain that 
whether Jeremy Taylor accompanied the king on the 
campaign, or awaited his arrival at Oxford, he took 
part in that delusive and ironic triumphal entry 
" amidst the plaudits of citizens and scholars," which 
closed the prologue to the long Civil War. 

A new patron now arose, to take the place of the 

24 



chap, ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 25 

fallen Laud. Amongst those who joined Charles I. at 
Oxford in November 1642 was Sir Christopher Hatton, 
a cousin of the great Chancellor. This gentleman had 
possibly been acquainted with Jeremy Taylor at Cam- 
bridge, since he was at Jesus College during some of 
the years which Taylor spent at Caius. Still more 
probably, he had known him as a neighbour, for 
Hatton's residence, Kirby Hall, although on the 
borders of Kockingham Forest in Northamptonshire, 
was but a few miles from Uppingham. Hatton enjoyed 
at this time "a great reputation," as Clarendon him- 
self, who disliked him, had to admit. He was con- 
sidered a person of high judgment, and he imposed 
himself upon Charles I., who frequently deferred to 
his opinion, and showed him constant favour. For a 
moment, Hatton seemed about to become a very pro- 
minent personage in England, but he did not stand 
the trial of adversity. "In a few years, he found a 
way utterly to lose" the "reputation he had made, and 
in his old age he was discredited and obscure. But 
at the outbreak of the war, he made a brilliant 
appearance, and the very best fact that history has 
preserved about him is that for six or seven years 
he was a liberal patron and faithful friend to Jeremy 
Taylor. 

The king's chaplain was by this time in the thick 
of the intellectual battle. On the 7th of September 
the House of Commons had passed a resolution for the 
abolition of all bishops, and the Lords had ratified the 
motion. It was necessary to contend immediately with 
this policy, so violent and monstrous to the consciences 
of half of the king's subjects. Jeremy Taylor sat 
down to produce that work of his which is commonly 



26 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

known as Episcopacy Asserted, the actual title of which, 
as published late in 1642, is Of the Sacred Order of Epi- 
scopacy. In this, Taylor's second book, the student of 
literature discovers little advance in style. The ex- 
cessive use of Latin and Greek quotation continues , 
from the brief, clear, argumentative statement all 
rhetoric and all ornament are excluded. The book is 
more a paraphrase of authorities and a compendium of 
ruling cases than a specimen of independent author- 
ship. The original edition of Episcopacy Asserted was 
dedicated to Hatton in a prefatory discourse, in which 
Taylor distinctly says that the statesman is his only 
resource; "I am forced upon you." He has found 
out that he has no private advantage to expect from 
his chaplaincy to the king; "my person must not go 
thither to sanctuary unless it be to pay my devotion." 
It is to Hatton that the book is commended, as a 
" tried friend " ; it is Hatton who must be to its 
author "a refuge for my need." 

The attitude of the young casuist is one of surprised 
indignation at the presumption of the sectaries. He 
cannot believe that the latter will be supported by the 
country; "it is the honour of the Church of England 
that all her children and obedient people are full of 
indignation against rebels, be they of any interest or 
party whatsoever." But as he proceeds with his dis- 
quisition, events are running faster than his pen, and 
he lifts his eyes from the page to see all Israel scattered 
upon the mountains as sheep that have no shepherd. 
Yet his spirits rise again ; he thinks that the authority 
and seemliness of Episcopacy have only to be made 
manifest for those who have rebelled to lay down 
their arms and crave for pardon. He sets himself to 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 27 

prove, with a myriad of instances borrowed from "the 
holy primitives/' that "the bishop is the bond and 
ligature of the Church's unity," and "separation from 
the bishop a symbol of faction." He arrogates "a 
capacity to the bishops " to undertake charges of public 
trust, — "it serves the King, it assists the Eepublic." 
He attacks with scorn "the white and watery colours 
of lay-elders." It is not probable that his arguments 
convinced a single Puritan in those angry days. His 
proofs of the necessity of absolute forms of Church 
government have not found favour with later theo- 
logians; even Bishop Heber, an enthusiast for the 
author, dismisses Episcopacy Asserted with the remark 
that the reasons on which Taylor rests his position 
aie as unsound as the position itself is prima facie 
questionable. 

The treatise, however, served its controversial pur- 
pose; it closes, in particular, with a freedom and 
energy of writing which were highly appreciated in 
the Oxford circle of Eoyalist scholars. On the 1st of 
November, by royal mandate, Taylor received the 
degree of doctor of divinity ; and early in the follow- 
ing year he was presented to a sinecure which was 
still vaguely within the influence of the king, that 
of Overstone, between Northampton and "Welling- 
borough. It is not improbable that this appointment 
was connected with his friendship with the Earl and 
Countess of Northampton, a relation which seems to 
have escaped the notice of all Jeremy Taylor's bio- 
graphers. But Spencer Compton, second Earl of 
Northampton, was not only the friend of Taylor, but 
apparently his patron, and his remarkable influence 
on the literary work of the divine will be mentioned 



28 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

later on. Of this Lord Northampton too little is 
preserved; as Clarendon said, he was "not known 
until his evening." After living a retired life in the 
enjoyment of his great wealth, he suddenly developed 
remarkable public energy at the breaking out of the 
Civil War. Charles I. perceived his singular import- 
ance, and in November 1642, after the battle of Edge- 
hill, Northampton was put in charge of the whole 
district in Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire which 
surrounded Banbury. He was extremely active, until 
his brilliant career was cut short, at the age of forty- 
two, at the battle of Hopton Heath, on the 19th of 
March 1643. When we consider that Taylor was his 
valued friend, and that Overstone was within what 
we may call Lord Northampton's military district, it 
is hard to believe that the appointment had no con- 
nection with the kindness either of the earl or of his 
lady. The widowed Countess Mary — who was the 
daughter of the poet of Bosworth Field, Sir John 
Beaumont — remained the protector of Taylor, and 
he described her afterwards, in reference to her kind- 
ness to him, as "hugely forward to entertain any 
instrument whereby she might grow and increase in 
the service of God and the charities of human people." 
Nothing seems to me more likely than that, when 
Taylor's wife and children were forced to leave 
Uppingham, Lady Northampton found a temporary 
asylum for them, half-way to Oxford, at Overstone. 
Meanwhile it is to be observed that as Lord North- 
ampton died early in 1643, and as he had been since 
the breaking out of the war closely engaged in military 
business, the long conversations in which " that excel- 
lent person" discussed theological literature with 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 29 

Jeremy Taylor were probably held before the summer 
of 1642. 1 

The favour which Christopher Hatton enjoyed with 
the king was now steadily on the increase. Various 
distinctions were conferred upon him ; he was raised 
to the peerage as Lord Hatton of Kirby in the summer 
of 1643, and before the winter of that year waj out, 
was appointed Comptroller of the King's Household, 
a post which he held as long as Charles had a house- 
hold to be comptrolled. Hatton's friendship for Taylor 
became still more practically intimate after this ap- 
pointment, and, as chaplain-in-ordinary and general 
manager of household business, the two were brought 
into constant intercourse. A curious incident unites 
tfc.3 names of these companions in a manner difficult 
to unravel. In 1644 a volume was published at Oxford, 
called The Psalter of David, "by the Right Honourable 
Christopher Hatton. " A manuscript note by Anthony 
a Wood, in a copy of the first edition, however, informs 
us that it was really composed by Jeremy Taylor, and 
after the death of both, on the title-page of the eighth 
edition, the name of Taylor was quietly substituted 
for that of Hatton by the publisher of 1672. Roger 
North says that Lord Hatton "had bright parts, and 

1 The parochial registers of Overstone, unfortunately, begin 
with the year of Jeremy Taylor's death, 1667. The Earl of 
Winchilsea and Nottingham very kindly allowed me to search 
the vast accretions of his family papers for undescribed letters 
of Jeremy Taylor which were believed to exist there. These, 
unhappily, could not be discovered, but during the investiga- 
tion we came by accident upon a deed of Charles I., with his 
great seal, granting the rectory of Overstone to Taylor. It is 
on this document, which remained in Lord Hatton's possession, 
that the statements in the text are founded. 



30 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

professed also to be religious." Eden, although he 
rejected the Psalter from Taylor's works, was inclined 
to think that he had a hand in preparing it for the 
press. It is a little edition of the Psalms, interspersed 
with collects, and intended for "the closets of divers 
devout persons." Nothing can be more natural than 
that Hatton should propose and design such a work, 
and should employ Taylor to carry it out under his 
supervision. 

For the next two years, to follow the fortunes of 
Jeremy Taylor is to trace the adventures of the royal 
household to which he was attached. Fuller had fled 
to Oxford, but neither he nor Chillingworth was in 
complete sympathy with the king or with his courtiers, 
and both soon passed elsewhere, Chillingworth to die 
of a wound received early in 1644 at the siege of 
Arundel. With Fuller, his one great literary rival, 
it does not seem that Taylor had any relations ; they 
appear to have lived side by side each unconscious of 
the other. On the 6th of May 1644 Mercurius Aulicus 
reports that the members have placed one Isaac Massey 
to preach at Uppingham, in the place of the true 
pastor, Doctor Jeremy Taylor, whose house had been 
"plundered, his estate seized, and his family driven 
out of doors." But the latter statement probably 
refers to events of the previous year. On the 3rd of 
June 1644, the exodus from Oxford began, and there 
were weary months of marching and counter-marching 
before, on the 23rd of November, the king re-entered 
that city in triumph. That temporary exultation soon 
sank in the depression of the poverty and distress at 
Oxford, where early in 1645 a wretchedness approach- 
ing to famine dismayed the royalist garrison. On 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 31 

January 10th, Taylor's earliest and most efficient friend, 
Laud, was executed. On the 7th of May the king 
marched out with his army towards the north, leaving 
Oxford to be starved up to the verge of submission. 
To and fro, through the Midland counties, Charles 
conducted his followers in vague and ineffectual man- 
oeuvres. By what means Jeremy Taylor became 
separated from the king's household it is impossible 
to determine ; but he was with Colonel Charles Gerard 
when that general was defeated in trying to relieve 
Cardigan Castle on the 4th of February 1645, and 
he was among the prisoners captured by the Parlia- 
mentarians. 

The campaign in South Wales raged up and down 
th^ valley of the Teify, and particularly round Cardigan 
Castle, which was the strategic base of that position. 
It was the brilliant Parliamentary general, Rowland 
Laugharne, who captured Cardigan at Christmas time 
1 644, although held by a strong garrison, who defended 
it "until a semi-culverine of brass, belonging to the 
Leopard, was mounted and played three days upon 
them, forcing a breach which was gallantly entered." 
On the 22nd of January 1645, Gerard, descending the 
Teify to check the invaders, was repulsed, and again, 
as we have seen, on the 4th of February, when Taylor 
must have been captured. Laugharne pushed on, 
impeded by his prisoners and his booty, to the investi- 
ture of Newcastle Emlyn, on the southern bank of the 
Teify, a strong fortress which was the key to Carmar- 
thenshire. Had the Parliamentarians stormed this 
place, they must have overrun the county. But on 
the 23rd of April the garrison of Newcastle Emlyn, 
taking advantage of their magnificent base, attacked 



32 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

the army of Laugharne, and completely routed it. 
Among the prisoners released by this turn in the 
fortunes of war, Taylor may possibly have been in- 
cluded. But it is more likely that he had been left 
behind in Cardigan Castle, and was now exchanged. 
It is to be noted, perhaps, that he must originally 
have started from Newcastle Emlyn with Gerard when 
he marched to attack Laugharne, and that this fortress 
(the New Castle of Emlyn) was the property and one 
of the residences of that Earl of Carbery (whose 
courtesy title was Lord Emlyn) who was shortly to 
be, if he was not already, Taylor's next patron. We 
are certain, however, only of the fact that he had now 
fallen into the hands of the enemy. 

Of the events which followed this catastrophe Taylor 
gives the following account, in language that is tanta- 
lisingly guarded : — 

" In this great storm which hath dashed the vessel of the 
Church all in pieces, I have been cast upon the coast of Wales, 
and in a little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and 
quietness which in England in a greater I could not hope for. 
Here I cast anchor, and thinking to ride safely, the storm 
followed me with so impetuous violence, that it broke a cable, 
and I lost my anchor. And here again I was exposed to the 
mercy of the sea, and the gentleness of an element that could 
neither distinguish things nor persons. And but that He 
who stilleth the raging of the sea, and the noise of His waves, 
and the madness of His people, had provided a plank for me, 
I had been lost to all the opportunities of content or study. 
But I know not whether I have been more preserved by the 
courtesies of my friends, or the gentleness and mercies of a 
noble enemy." 

From the opening words of this passage we must 
infer that when Taylor left the king, and retreated to 



n.: THE CIVIL WAR 33 

b Wales, it was with the idea of settling : clerical 

work, not, as has been supposed, :: marching as a 
soldier, since the "little sat "is manifestly contrasted 
with the "greatei ::" Oxford, [Then, :•:::-; the capture 
a: Cardigan, from which it is said that Lr was .sickly 

here ::--:ructed thai .:':.:- being in 
imminent danger from the Puritan army which was 
sweeping South Wales, Jeremy Taylor was saved by 
the joint action of his friends and :: : •• a noble enemy." 
The identity of the latter is unknown, and fa 

vlor's annotators. Hel . _ isly argued 
it must be Colonel Laugharne, his captor and the 
governor of Pembroke Cast! I this there is no 

evidence whatever. Noi II ieve that, in the 

arlance of the seventeenth century. Lang] >r any 

o'ther of the men who came to the front in Pembrokeshire 
as the leaders of the popular cause, would be styled a 
"noble" enemy. This points to one who was techni- 
cally a nobleman, and unless we may conjecture that 
s srresponded with, I confess that I am quite 
at a loss to identify Taylor's possible deliverer. It 
would greatly simplify our inquiry if we could per- 
:hat the " noble enemy "was Richard 
ighan, second Earl of Ga th whom Jeremy 

r was now about to take np his abode at G 
Grove. 

The difficulty is that Lord Carbery was, at least 
nominally, a royalist, and therefore no "enemy" 
But the passage which has just been quoted appeared 
in 1647, in the preface to 7" Libert tj I isying, 
a book primarily intended to be read by the king. 
Taylor's language is veiled in an allusive obscurity 
which is almost unintelligible unless we suppose that to 
c 



34 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

have been lucid would have been to be guilty of indis- 
cretion. Now, it is certain that Taylor's position at 
Golden Grove was rendered doubly delicate, and yet, 
with care, doubly secure, by the ambiguous political 
attitude of Lord Carbery. That nobleman belonged 
to a type of moderates, few in number in that hour 
and place, who sympathised with liberty of conscience, 
while deploring the excesses of the fanatics, and who 
wished to support the king, while detesting his 
obstinacy and ignorance. He was, in fact, exactly 
what, a little later and with great injustice, grew 
to be called a " trimmer," and all we know of his 
character fits in with Halifax's inimitable description 
of the man who could " distinguish and desire a mean 
between the sauciness of some of the Scotch apostles, 
and the undecent courtship of some of the silken 
divines, who do practise to bow at the altar only to 
learn to make the better legs at court." 

Lord Carbery, who was for many years to be the 
protector and companion of Jeremy Taylor, was at 
this time a man of between forty and fifty years of 
age. His position as one of the wealthiest landlords 
in South Wales gave him great local importance, and 
when the Civil War broke out, his loyalty to the 
king was unquestioned. He organised the formation 
of militia in his own counties of Carmarthen and 
Cardigan, and after the first battles he was appointed 
lieutenant-governor of the army in these shires, and 
in that of Pembroke. But he showed little zeal, and 
less as time went on. Doubtless he grew increasingly 
disturbed by doubts of the entire justice of the Royalist 
cause. Meanwhile, there were opposed to him the 
energy and rapidity of Rowland Laugharne; and 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 35 

Lord Carbery became more and more languid as a 
general. In March 1644 bis troops were driven out 
of Pembrokeshire, and he took the opportunity to 
resign his appointment in favour of Gerard. He 
withdrew to his house of Golden Grove, and rumours 
were soon current of his cultivating the company of 
his opponents too tamely, until it was more than hinted 
that his allegiance was dubious. He was certainly 
the friend and correspondent of Essex; he was no 
less certainly treated with singular mildness by the 
victorious Parliamentarians. Later on in the story 
we shall find him acquiescing contentedly in the action 
of the House of Commons. The loyalists broadly 
impeached both his integrity and his courage. But 
th^re is no evidence that Lord Carbery was a coward ; 
he was a " trimmer," in the original sense. He was 
a tolerant and thoughtful man, whose conscience 
hung in the balance between two causes, and gradually 
leaned over on the liberal side. But by 1647, when 
Jeremy Taylor wrote his dedication, Carbery might 
well be regarded by Charles I. as a " noble enemy." 

The storm of 1645, however, cast Taylor, deprived 
of books, effects, and means, into "a private corner 
of the world," as Rust tells us, where "a tender 
providence shrouded him under her wings, and the 
prophet was fed in the wilderness." In a romantic 
valley of Carmarthenshire, an Oxford friend of 
Taylor's, William Wyatt, had recently joined the 
distinguished grammarian, Dr. William Nicholson, to 
help him in starting a private school. Taylor may 
well have known Nicholson also, since the future 
Bishop of Gloucester was a frequent visitor to Oxford. 
Since 1626, Nicholson had been rector of Llandilo- 



36 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

vawr, and Wyatt of Llanfihangel-Aberbythych, the 
church of which was contiguous, on the west side, 
with the park of Golden Grove. In the rectory, we 
may suppose, the storm-tossed fugitive was originally 
received, while suggestions were being made for 
"supplying him with bread and necessaries." One 
of the earliest initiations would naturally be to take 
him to the great house, where the general patron, 
Lord Carbery, fell under Taylor's customary spell, 
welcomed him to Golden Grove, and presently made 
him his chaplain. 

These household duties did not prevent him from 
joining Nicholson and Wyatt in their school, which 
was held at a house called Newton Hall, which 
Nicholson rented. This "private academy" was 
highly successful, until the Restoration rendered its 
revenue needless to its principal founders. Wood 
says that "several youths were most loyally edu- 
cated there, and afterwards sent to the universities." 
Of these, young Christopher Hatton, the future first 
Viscount Hatton, was one, and another was the 
boy who afterwards became a judge, Sir John 
Powell, and who in 1650 was matriculated from 
Newton Hall, or Collegium Newtoniense, as the fond 
pedantry of its founders preferred to call it. Other 
obscurer pupils have recorded their appreciation of 
their masters, who, in 1647, issued a Grammar, 
apparently a joint production, to which Jeremy 
Taylor contributed a florid dedication in English. 

A third means of support remained within Taylor's 
reach, his pen. But on his first arrival at Llanfihan- 
gel-Aberbythych he was sadly hampered by the want of 
books. He had been accustomed, in his Oxford days, 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 37 

to that excessive and almost incessant reference to 
authorities, which was so devastating to the prose of 
that age, and particularly to its theology. In his 
present retirement he felt, at first, helpless away from 
a library • in the " voisinage " of Golden Grove there 
were no volumes of a casuistical species, and it was 
long before he took courage to make bricks without 
patristic straw. He waited to begin to write in Wales, 
he tells us, until he felt that he "needed no other 
books or aids than what a man carries with him on 
horseback." Then he became, for the first time, a free 
writer and a great master of English. But, at the 
beginning, his spirits were too far cast down, and his 
hopes too shattered to enable him to do more than 
his ordinary daily business. He suffered, after the 
shock of his disaster and his peril, from a severe 
reaction, during which he could do no more than 
brood over "the public dyscrasj T " — as he loves to 
call it — and all the calamities of his Church and 
country. "I had seen my design blasted in the bud," 
he says, "and I despaired in the Calends of doing 
what I purposed in the Ides before." But gradually 
this melancholy passed away, and he turned to literary 
labour. 

He now secured the valuable co-operation of the 
eminent royalist publisher, Richard Royston, who, in 
1647, bought up the remainders of Taylor's early works, 
and issued them with his own imprint. Royston, who 
was to be Taylor's publisher for the future, was a man of 
much capacity and resource. He was the leader of his 
profession all through the middle of the seventeenth 
century, and when he died, full of wealth and con- 
sideration, in 1686, he was nearly ninety years of age. 



38 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Royston was "bookseller to three kings," and in his 
loyalist enthusiasm frequently got into trouble during 
the Commonwealth. He was accused, and with perfect 
justice, of being "a constant factor for all scandalous 
books " against the decrees of the House of Commons. 
His relations with Jeremy Taylor, although strained 
once or twice, were on the whole creditable and 
advantageous to both. 

In the remainder of this chapter we will confine our- 
selves to a rapid survey of Jeremy Taylor's publications 
during the first four years of his residence at Golden 
Grove, because they all belong, in conception if not in 
execution, to the earlier period of his career. Although 
he was stripped, after Cardigan, of all his papers, so 
that he became "full of apprehension that I should live 
unprofitably, and die obscurely, and be forgotten," it is 
evident that he must have left some of his manuscripts 
at All Souls, whence they were afterwards partly sent 
to him. This is confirmed by the fact that at least one 
manuscript, that of his Reverence due to the Altar, being 
mislaid, remained at Oxford. The first work which 
Taylor prepared at Golden Grove for the press was 
that which is now generally known as An Apology far 
Liturgy, part of which appeared anonymously, as A Dis- 
course concerning Prayer, towards the close of 1646. 
Taylor found means to bring this surreptitious issue 
under the notice of Charles I.; and he produced the 
complete work, with a daring dedication, " to his most 
sacred majesty," just before the king's execution; 
this should not be overlooked as a proof of Taylor's 
fidelity and courage. 

An Apology for Liturgy was a very popular work 
among the High Church party, and was often reprinted 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 39 

in the course of Taylor's life. It is a reply to the 
decisions of the House of Commons as embodied in the 
ordinance of January 1645, by which the Book of 
Common Prayer was abolished, and a Directory of 
Worship set up to enforce uniformity. But it is not 
necessary to suppose that Taylor waited for this enact- 
ment, which was but the official promulgation of views 
which had been loudly expressed for three years past. 
The beauty and fitness for its purpose of the English 
liturgy in its entire constitution, the " ghostly advan- 
tage " of employing it, the quality of the priest's power 
in absolution, the importance of praying to God "with 
consideration," the scandal of allowing the ecclesiastical 
regiment to become a democracy, all these were themes 
tamiliar to his thoughts, although the action of the 
Directory compelled him to publication. 

From a literary point of view, An Apology for Liturgy 
shows a growing freedom in style. The colloquial turn 
of some of the sentences, and the use of "Well!" in 
argument betray the orator beneath the casuist. The 
treatise is rather rich in faint autobiographical touches. 
Taylor's romantic attachment to the set forms of 
worship takes beautiful shapes : " I can but with joy 
and eucharist consider with what advantages and 
blessings the pious protestant is entertained, and 
blessed, and armed against all his needs, by the con- 
stant and religious usage of the Common Prayer 
Book." We listen with pleasure while he dilates on 
his own singular relish in the collects, and his joy in 
the forms of confession and praise. His idea of prayer 
was of something deliberate and stately ; he did not 
believe in impromptu devotion, or worship conducted 
without art or deliberation. He faintly and grudgingly 



40 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

admits the use of private extempore prayer, but 
evidently disparages it, and asks why the Holy Spirit 
should fly from us at the sight of an ink-horn. 
Jeremy Taylor himself wrote down all his prayers. 
In An Apology for Liturgy we find him still intolerant, 
still the enemy of every sort of innovation. The 
change, therefore, to his next public appearance is 
something startling. 

On the 28th of June 1647 was published a work, 
the importance of which cast all Taylor's previous 
productions into insignificance. The Liberty of Pro- 
phesying was his first long book, and it was his first 
independent book. In it, for the first time, he came 
forward as a great theological innovator. It is true, as 
S. R. Gardiner has pointed out, that "three-fourths of its 
argument were written under the influence of Chilling- 
worth's " Religion of a Protestant. Doubtless all those 
walks in Oxford gardens, at the close of which Chilling- 
worth had found cause gently to complain of Taylor's 
inattention, had produced far more effect on the 
younger divine than the elder supposed. Never- 
theless, the attitude of Taylor in 1647 was a pro- 
foundly individual one, and in one respect, and that 
the most important, it owed nothing to a predecessor. 
Chillingworth's entire interest had been swallowed up 
in his analysis of English divergencies from Rome. 
In the general "dyscrasy " Taylor gave little thought 
to the Papal system ; he was absorbed in the troubles 
nearer home. He has still to be fighting along the 
narrow Anglican ridge, but his sword is turned mainly 
now towards the side of Geneva. 

The sword, however, though still unsheathed, takes 
a far less prominent place than the palm-branch in The 



II.] THE CIVIL WAR 41 

Liberty of Prophesying. The discourse opens with a 
yearning cry for amity. The Oxford attitude, the 
old Laudian arrogance, have given way to a softer 
tolerance. Jeremy Taylor has grown gentle and meek 
in his adversity. He is no longer "hasty in calling 
every disliked opinion by the name of heresy." There 
is, we must perhaps admit, the natural difference 
which comes over the advocate of a majority when he 
has to appeal for a minority. The natural timidity 
of Taylor, the too-easily fluttered spirits, have to be 
taken into account. As Canon Hensley Henson has 
put it, "his sense of the inherent wrongfulness of 
forcing conscience was quickened by the discomforts 
of his lot." But these do not explain the sudden 
burst of intellectual and moral liberality which make 
The Liberty of Prophesying such a stimulating volume. 
We read it with enthusiasm, because it shows a real 
and surprising growth in virtue and wisdom. 

The spirit which inspires the author of this treatise 
is the hope to see the English Church, over which the 
flood has swept, repair its scattered ruins, and be 
redintegrated in a new Pentecost. He sees that this 
may be done by the way of peace. He has the brilliant 
intuition that if the divided tongues of the Spirit are 
of the same fire, their different operation may be 
left to lead automatically towards a more splendid 
illumination of truth. From this conception of unity 
in difference, casting out the ugliness of discord, The 
Liberty of Prophesying starts, and the author develops, 
on these lines, a courageous, and, in spite of what had 
been said by earlier and more partial opponents of 
tyranny, in the main a perfectly novel plea for the 
right of religious liberty. The book is inspired by 



42 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

the warmest and the most delicate Christian charity, 
expounded at an hour and in a country where passion 
had made charity almost appear untenable. It had 
occurred to Taylor in his solitude that the general 
violence of religious anger in England was as absurd 
as it was hateful; that it must be "inconsistent with 
God's goodness to condemn those who err when the 
error hath nothing of the will in it." Every man 
must be left free to find out, according to his best 
lights, what is truth to him. It is the sin against the 
heavenly vision which is the worst offence, and after 
all "no man's spirit is known to any but to God and 
himself." On the other hand, as has been pointed out, 
Taylor had the signal independence to oppose the 
theory which was almost universal in the Puritan 
society of his day, and which was eminently defended 
by Milton, that sectarianism itself was praiseworthy. 

The importance of this wonderful book, from the 
theological and philosophical side, is so great that 
many writers have not scrupled to give it the highest 
place among the works of its author. Without under- 
valuing it in the least, however, it must be pointed out 
that on purely literary grounds The Liberty of Pro- 
phesying can lay no claim to such pre-eminence. It is 
written in a stjde very clear, simple, and unadorned, 
with a sweetness of temper entirely characteristic of 
its writer, and with none or few of those impediments, 
those pedantic snags in the current, which had hitherto 
impeded the course of Taylor's language. He bitterly 
deplores his separation from his books ; but we may 
rejoice at his release from their bondage. He still has 
his beloved Prudentius, and his not less valued Horace, 
and he is more free to use them, now that his shelves 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 43 

are no longer crowded with folio Fathers. He does 
not regret his past study of the schoolmen, but has 
abandoned them for the present ; he recognises their 
weak logic and their contradictions and their narrow- 
ness ; he laughs out loud at the folly of Pope Adrian VI. 
in believing that " all poetry was heretical." But with 
all the amenity and all the eloquence of The Liberty of 
Prophesying, it does not exhibit to us the glory of 
Taylor. It is bare and a little dry in statement; 
there is a remarkable absence of that pomp of imagery 
which is characteristic of his finest writing. Its 
lucidity is slightly humdrum ; it presents few passages 
which could be separated from their context, and 
exhibited as specimens of English. But that his style, 
though still unadorned, had become admirably pure 
and direct, a fragment of narrative, not untouched 
with humour, may exemplify : — 

"It was an argument of some wit, but of singularity of 
understanding, that happened in the great contestation 
between the missals of S. Ambrose and S. Gregory. The 
lot was thrown, and God made to be judge, so as He was 
tempted to a miracle to answer a question which themselves 
might have ended without much trouble. The two missals 
were laid upon the altar, and the church door shut and sealed. 
By the morrow matins they found S . Gregory's missal torn in 
pieces and thrown about the church, but S. Ambrose's opened 
and laid upon the altar in a posture of being read. If I had 
been to judge of the meaning of this miracle, I should have 
made no scruple to have said it had been the will of God that 
the missal of S. Ambrose, which had been anciently used and 
publicly tried and approved of, should still be read in the 
Church. And that of Gregory let alone, it being torn by an 
angelical hand as an argument of its imperfection, or of the 
inconvenience of innovation. But yet they judged it other- 
wise. For, by the tearing and scattering about, they thought 



44 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

it was meant it should be used over all the world, and that of 
S. Ambrose read only in the church of Milan. I am more 
satisfied that the former was the true meaning than I am of 
the truth of the story ; but we must suppose that." 

The attitude of Taylor must not be confounded with 
that which had been adopted as early as 1641 by 
Williams, and after the battle of Edgehill by the 
party of Holies. Fuller had reminded the House of 
Commons, unwilling listeners to his plea, that "Blessed 
are the peace-makers," and others less eloquent than 
he had desired to discover for the Church of England 
a middle path between Laud and the Presbyterians. 
There had been a desire expressed, here and there, in 
intervals of weariness after the clash of arms, for rest 
in a reasonable common creed. The Puritans were to 
concede some points on their side, the Episcopalians 
to push their demands less stringently ; extremists 
were to avoid running a-tilt against the scruples of 
their neighbours. Fuller, for instance, while he was 
hopeful that the king would show "a fair condescen- 
sion in matters of church reformation," denied "any 
transcendent extraordinary miraculous light" to the 
lay preachers of the Separatists. Williams was more 
outspoken in his famous pamphlet, The Bloody Tenet 
of Persecution (1644), in which he deprecated all recourse 
to the civil arm, and recommended for the correc- 
tion of spiritual offences a spiritual censure. As 
Gardiner has excellently said, all these preluders of 
the principle of toleration longed for peace through 
mutual concession. As much may be said for the 
anonymous author of that very remarkable tract, 
Liberty of Conscience, of which the same historian 
has given so valuable an account; although that 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 45 

also marks a stage along the road of humanity and 
charity. 

In spite of the liberality shown, on certain points, 
by Cromwell, in spite of Milton's voice lifted so nobly 
in Comus and Areopagitica, in spite, too, of the glimmer- 
ings exhibited by that odd group of dissenters who 
were called the Independents, it cannot be said that 
liberty of conscience, in the broad and modern sense, 
was brought before the minds of Englishmen until 
Jeremy Taylor published his Liberty of Prophesying. 
It is an extraordinary proof of the vigour of his mind, 
that he, of all men living, trained at Cambridge and 
Oxford in the very mysteries of Thorough, the proUgi 
of Laud, the companion of Juxon and Sheldon, should, 
without passing through any violent crisis, by the 
sheer evolution of his piety and tenderness, have 
broken through the thickest crust of prejudice. This 
danger of being misunderstood or too well under- 
stood was extreme ; and if his situation had not been 
eminently propitious, it is probable that he could not 
have dared to affront the fanaticism of the age with 
paragraphs so out-spoken as the following : — 

" Well, thus far are we come ! Although we are secured 
in fundamental points from involuntary error by the plain 
express, and dogmatical places of Scripture, yet in other things 
we are not, and may be invincibly mistaken, because of the 
obscurity and difficulty in the controverted parts of Scrip- 
ture. . . . Councils are contradictory to each other, and there- 
fore certainly are equally deceived, many of them. Then the 
Popes of Rome are very likely to mislead us, but cannot ascertain 
us of truth in matter of question. And in this world we believe 
in part, and prophesy in part, and this imperfection shall 
never be done away till we be transplanted to a more glorious 
state. Either, then, we must throw our chances and get truth 



46 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

by accident or predestination, or else we must lie safe in a 
mutual toleration and private liberty of persuasion, unless 
somo other anchor can be thought upon where we may fasten 
our floating vessels and ride safely." 

Here we have the note which was so absolutely 
novel in Taylor. Those who preceded him by a year 
or two, in their meditations on a possible religious peace, 
had conceived a plan of mutual concession, of agree- 
ment upon common essentials. But it was Taylor who 
first conceived of a toleration not founded upon agree- 
ment or concession, but upon a broad basis of practical 
piety, of loyal confidence in that church which, as he 
says in one of his luminous phrases, "is not a chimera, 
or a shadow, but a company of men believing in Jesus 
Christ," and therefore able to trust the bona fides of 
others who approach the same truth from a different 
standpoint. He called the sour fanatics of his time — 
and in 1644 not to be a fanatic of some sort was almost 
to be a changeling or pariah — back to the humane and 
merciful doctrine of Jesus Christ, "whose lessons were 
softer than nard or the juice of the Candian olive." 
In an age altogether given up to proscription and per- 
secution, Jeremy Taylor lifted his clear voice in proof 
of "the unreasonableness of prescribing to other 
men's faith, and the iniquity of persecuting differing 
opinions." 

It is not too much to claim for Taylor, in the 
religious and intellectual order, something of the 
gratitude which we all pay, or should by common 
justice pay, to Sir James Simpson in the physical order. 
It would be impossible to estimate the alleviation which 
Taylor's tolerant theory, in its successive extensions, 
has brought to the multitudes of men. Such horrors 



ii. ] THE CIVIL WAR 47 

in the cruel chastisement of impiety as followed the 
battle of Naseby were to be impossible again among 
civilised Englishmen as long as the world should last. 
It was gradually to be understood that sin is not to 
be punished by torture, and that the liberal opinion 
that "all papists, and anabaptists, and sacramentaries, 
are fools and wicked persons " was no longer to be an 
excuse for ferocious reprisals. Those, and all errors 
which are of the head and not the heart, were to be 
treated for the future with argument and a meek 
humility, — the blessed anaesthetics which this great 
innovator introduced into the practice of religious 
surgery. What the world has gained in loss of pain is 
incalculable. There is, perhaps, no man to-day in 
England, who worships, or who worships not, as his 
conscience bids him, who does not owe a fraction of 
his peace to Jeremy Taylor. 

Even in the shades of Golden Grove, and close to 
the rural " Church of the Angels," such a novel doctrine 
could not be promulgated without danger. Of course 
Taylor was careful to guard himself from misconcep- 
tion ; equally, of course, he was instantly misconceived. 
He was careful to limit his plea for toleration to those 
who unite in the Christian Creed, but this was of slight 
importance in that day, when, in the civilised parts of 
Europe, it would have been difficult to discover persons 
not Jews or atheists not nominally covered by this 
general confession. He does not say, so far as I have 
been able to discover, a single word which would 
exclude from toleration those outside the Christian 
pale; he merely does not consider them. He seems 
to admit that if there come into being religious systems 
which teach rebellion or immorality, these may be sub- 



48 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

dued by force of arms. This was, perhaps, illogical, 
but some such admission was inevitable in the face of 
the war at that moment raging in these islands, a war 
which Taylor's loyalty to the king would not permit 
him to stigmatise directly. In every legitimate mode, 
with every phrase of moderation, he sought to con- 
ciliate those whom his theory of toleration might be 
expected to wound and startle. 

Of these, the first was the king himself. When 
The Liberty of Prophesying was published, Charles I. had 
recently been seized, after that vivid scene in the 
garden at Holmby, and had been carried about the 
country, an embarrassing hostage, by Joyce and his 
troops. This had been the opening of the fifth act of 
his tragedy, and now Charles was in more need than 
any of his subjects of the nard and balsam of charity. 
By the time Taylor's book could reach him, he was 
ensconced at Caversham under Lord Craven's care, and 
there he read, no doubt with fervent interest, the new 
book of his old chaplain. Intolerant as were his 
enemies, however, they met with a narrowness no less 
stubborn in the king. Even in his hour of humilia- 
tion — " causeless they like a bird have chased me" — 
Charles I. could not accept the principle of a free con- 
science. He expressed his displeasure to his chaplains, 
and he instructed one of them, Dr. Henry Hammond, 
who was an old personal friend of Taylor, and had 
succeeded him in the royal household, to frame 
a reply. 

The gentle and dignified Hammond was one of the 
most uplifted spirits who were gathered about Charles I. 
in his decline ; he had been made his private chaplain 
in Oxford in 1644, and he kept near him in spite of all 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 49 

machinations of the enemy, who specially dreaded his 
influence, until Christmas of this year, 1647, when the 
king was deprived of all his servants. Hammond was 
famous for his lavish benevolence. Although a great 
deal of money passed into his hands, he was always 
poor, for he was always giving. He had much in 
common with Taylor ; like him, Hammond had written 
in defence of Episcopacy and of the liturgy ; and later 
on in this very year he published The Christian's Obliga- 
tion to Peace and Chanty. In this, however, his views 
are conventional, and show no grasp of Jeremy Taylor's 
position. It was in his Letter of Resolution that Ham- 
mond embodied what seem to have been the king's 
m:.in objections to Liberty of Prophesying, in a discussion 
of "six Quares." He traverses Taylor's already sur- 
prising views about the baptism of children and rebukes 
his mildness to Anabaptists. But there is no venom in 
Hammond. He praises the "diligence" of the very 
arguments he refutes, and is everywhere inspired by 
friendliness and courtesy. 

There were many attacks of a severer kind made 
against Taylor's volume. According to Heber, who 
undertook an examination of these pamphlets, most of 
which are obscure and insignificant, the most serious 
was that made by Samuel Rutherford of St. Andrews, in 
his Free Disputation against pretended Liberty of Conscience. 
Xor would this savage libel deserve the briefest mention 
here, were it not that its sordid existence curiously links 
with the name of Jeremy Taylor those of Milton and 
of S. T. Coleridge. It is supposed that Milton, who 
already admired Taylor's genius, and had read The 
Liberty of Prophesying with approval, was so much in- 
censed at Rutherford's odious defence of persecution 
D 



50 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

and his attack on the gentle charity of Taylor, that, in 
his sonnet on the "New Forces," he expressed his 
horror that a "Scotch what d'ye call" should venture 
to speak in such terms of opprobrium as Eutherford 
used for Taylor ; and that 

" Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent 
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul, 
Must now be nam'd and printed heretics." 

This conjunction of Milton and Jeremy Taylor, in its 
turn, called forth a century and a half later, from the 
youthful S. T. Coleridge, an encomiastic parallel of the 
genius of these two men, which is one of the most 
splendid tributes to Taylor ever written. 

A little later in the summer of 1647, we have a 
glimpse of Charles I. at Caversham, reported by Sir 
Philip Warwick, who was permitted a very brief inter- 
view with him : — 

" I could perceive " (writes Warwick) " he was very appre- 
hensive in what hands he was, but was not to let it be dis- 
cerned. Nor had he given his countenance unto Dr. Taylor's 
Liberty of Prophesying, which some believed he had ; but that 
really and truly it was refreshment to his spirit to be used 
with some civility, and to serve God as he was wont, and to 
see some old faces about him." 

The wording of this phrase seems to convey that 
Charles had been reproached by his Puritan jailors 
with his supposed approval of his former chaplain's 
revolutionary sentiments, with regard to liberty of 
conscience, and that he was anxious to remove this 
impression. Probably very few persons, in either 
camp, were content at first to accept Taylor's position, 
but he had sown good seed. Meanwhile, in August 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 51 

Charles was brought up to Putney, whence in November 
he fled to the Isle of Wight, still ready in his amazing 
blindness to be Pater Patrice, on his own terms. But he 
was approaching the end of his career, and from 
Christmas 1647, he was a helpless prisoner in Caris- 
brooke Castle. 

The year 1648 was one of extreme disturbance in 
South Wales, and must have included the most anxious 
months of Taylor's residence there. Laugharne, his 
old enemy, veered round to the king's side, and an 
officer of his, Poyer, taking the initiative, drove the 
Parliamentarians out of Pembrokeshire in March. 
South Wales suddenly declared for the king. Horton 
was sent down to meet the mutineers, and in April 
Poyer marched his army across Carmarthenshire to 
check him, passing close to Golden Grove. By the 
end of the month, the whole of the neighbourhood was 
in revolt, and as Horton advanced the Welsh fled to 
their hills. The business was so serious that Cromwell 
himself was sent down from London, but before he 
reached South Wales, Horton had routed Laugharne 
and the rebels at the battle of St. Fagans, near Llandaff, 
on the 8th of May. The revolt was crushed, but 
Cromwell's advance brought terror before it. He cap- 
tured Chepstow Castle on the 25th, and then marched 
westwards through Glamorganshire and Carmarthen- 
shire. His direct road brought him across the Towey 
at the town of Llandilovawr, where he was almost in 
sight of Golden Grove : he must have reached this 
point on or about the 28th of May, 1648. 

Cromwell's approach threw Lord Carbery into a 
violent apprehension. The general was presently seen, 
with a troop of horse, riding across country towards 



52 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Golden Grove. The pacific owner of that estate, who 
had already, we are told, been "pardoned" by Laug- 
harne, was now in danger of seeing all his property 
sequestered by Laugharne's conqueror. On receiving 
news that Cromwell was coming, the earl fled across 
the fields to one of his remoter farms, leaving his 
countess to receive their alarming guest. Lady Car- 
bery, no doubt, was encouraged to believe that she 
could plead her husband's cause with success, if only, 
like Lady Verney two years earlier, she could "bring 
her spirit to a soliciting temper, and tell how to use 
the juice of an onion to soften " her visitor's heart. It 
was in this spirit that the countess received Cromwell 
at the doors of Golden Grove, and civilly invited him 
to dismount. The resident chaplain would, as a 
matter of course, be at her side to support her ; and we 
cannot doubt that Taylor's exquisite amenity and 
courtesy had their share in bringing about the sur- 
prising result. Cromwell, who came to sequester, 
stayed to dine ; and in the afternoon pursued his 
march to the beleaguerment of Tenby and Pembroke. 
The antiquary, who tells the anecdote, does not in sq 
many words inform us what concessions were made at 
the dinner-table. But Lord Carbery, of all the magnates 
of South Wales, alone escaped sequestration. With 
what a sigh of relief the crafty lady and her chaplain 
must have seen the horsemen move away towards 
Carmarthen, and with what haste a messenger must 
have been sent to fetch the earl home from his hiding- 
place ! Lord Carbery, who was the most conspicuous 
trimmer of the province, gave no further cause of sus- 
picion to Parliament, and was left undisturbed. It 
would even seem that Oliver Cromwell recalled his 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 53 

visit to Lady Carbery with pleasure, for a few years 
later he sent down several stags to furnish the park at 
Golden Grove. 

The king's fortunes were the subject of anxious 
solicitude to Jeremy Taylor, and he discussed them 
with zest and prolixity. In this same year, 1648, he 
had a meeting with Dr. Thomas Bayly, who had been 
closely identified with Charles I. at Eaglan Castle. 
Bayly professed to guide the king's conscience, and 
had published an imaginary conversation between the 
king and the Marquis of Worcester, which was much 
talked about at the moment. "What I delivered in 
transitu, when I had the happiness last to meet you, I 
krow I poured into a breast locked up as religiously 
as the priests of Cybele," is a phrase which Taylor uses 
in a very long letter, addressed to Bayly on the Vigils 
of Christmas 1648. According to his biographers, 
Bayly left England for France and Flanders in the 
latter part of 1646, and did not return until after the 
king's death, but this must be a mistake. Bayly was 
hardly worthy of Taylor's sympathy ; he was a fussy 
and braggart Royalist, who ultimately turned Romanist, 
attacked the institutions of England, and died obscurely 
in Italy. 

Great, however, as was Jeremy Taylor's interest in 
passing events, and in the fate of those friends who 
were most dear to him, they did not occupy all his 
thoughts during these distracted years. In 1649 he 
completed, and gave to the world, a work of large 
proportions, and eminently original plan, which ex- 
hibited his literary powers as they had never been 
exhibited before. The Great Exemplar was in the purely 
intellectual field as novel an enterprise as Liberty of 



54 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Prophesying had been in the moral and controversial. 
It was an attempt, on a huge scale, at the production 
of a class of book, no specimen of which had been pre- 
sented to the English public before, but which has been 
abundantly imitated since, and has had its lasting in- 
fluence on our literature. Before we consider the 
peculiarly novel characteristics of this work, and its 
disposition and structure, it will be well to bring to- 
gether what can be recovered as to its history. 

That it was not designed at Golden Grove, or even 
mainly written there, is evident, from the part in its 
preparation which was taken by Lord Northampton. 
That nobleman, as we have seen, was killed at the 
battle of Hopton Heath, early in 1643. His share, 
therefore, in the conception of The Gh'eat Exemplar must 
be precedent to that date ; and as he was closely engaged 
in military duties from the breaking out of the Civil 
War until his death, Taylor's communications with 
him on the subject are probably not to be placed later 
than the middle of 1642. But up to that time, if we 
possessed no other evidence than that which has been 
known to Taylor's biographers, we should be justified 
in believing the divine to be a docile and unquestioning 
disciple of the Oxford casuists, a submissive pupil of 
Laud in the propaganda of Thorough, placed at All 
Souls College, and remaining there, for the sole pur- 
pose of ministering to the cause by his patriotic learn- 
ing and storehouse of instances. 

It is, therefore, of extraordinary interest to learn 
that at a date which cannot be later than 1642 a 
single far-sighted friend had perceived that Taylor was 
throwing away his genius upon " the spinosities of the 
schools," and had determined to divert him into a 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 55 

more primrose path. The language Jeremy Taylor 
uses must be carefully examined. He says that the 
Earl of Northampton's mind was the " soil " in which 
"the first design of these papers," that is to say, of 
The Great Exemplar, "grew"; that "what that rare 
person conceived, I was left to the pains and danger 
of bringing forth." The image here is exactly the same 
which has fascinated and baffled successive generations 
of Shakespearian critics. As "W. H. was "the sole 
begetter" of the Sonnets, so Lord Northampton was 
the sole " conceiver " of The Great Exemplar. In each 
case, it is not rational to doubt, there is an intention 
to attribute to a noble friend the suggestion, the bias, 
which led the writer along a new experiment in his 
art. In each case, below the form of compliment, is a 
statement of cause and effect which it is preposterous 
to overlook or to minimise. 

In Taylor's case, when he made his statement, the 
widowed Countess of Northampton, who remained his 
friend, was alive and well aware of the circumstances. 
He appeals to her recollections : " Your Honour best 
knows" how mere a matter of honesty it is for the 
author to recall the facts. When the lady reads 
the pages of The Great Exemplar she will recollect at 
once that her late husband, "that excellent personage, 
was their first root," and that they are "the fruits of 
his," Lord Northampton's, "abode." This is a curious 
phrase, but I take it to mean no more than his abode 
on earth, before he was " transplanted to heaven " by 
his sudden death. Lady Northampton is conjured to 
welcome the book "for its first relation," that is to say, 
no doubt, for the fact that its origin and substance will 
both of them recall sad and yet proud memories to her 



56 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

mind; and to set its imperfections down not to its 
"fountain," her husband, but to Jeremy Taylor, who 
is " the channel of its progress and emanation." 

If these phrases have any meaning at all, it is plain 
that they indicate that Lord Northampton, who must 
have had close opportunities of studying the mind of 
Taylor, was sorry to see so splendid a gift of rhetoric 
and pathos expended on "problems and inactive dis- 
courses," that is to say on hair-splitting casuistry. He 
persuaded the pupil of Laud and Richard Montagu 
that it was "the nature of disputings, that they begin 
commonly in mistakes, proceed with zeal and fancy, and 
end not at all but in schisms and uncharitable names, 
and too often dip their feet in blood." In saying this, 
Lord Northampton found an eager listener. Humble 
and tractable as Taylor was, and honest in his service 
for Laud, he had to confess that he was "weary and 
toiled with rowing up and down in the seas of ques- 
tions which the interests of Christendom have com- 
menced." The design which his noble friend sketched 
out, and which the earl's premature death forbade him 
to enjoy in its execution, was no less than this, " to put 
a portion of the holy fire into a repository, which might 
help to re-enkindle the incense, when it shall please 
God religion shall return, and all His servants sing In 
convertendo captivitatem Sion with a voice of eucharist." 

If we turn to The Great Exemplar to see how this 
experiment was carried out, we are first of all impressed 
by the negative qualities of the book. It has none of 
the dryness, none of the nakedness which had indis- 
putably been the growing faults of English theology. 
The author glances at the works of his contemporaries, 
and he decides that " they may be learned, but they 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 57 

are not wise." He will sacrifice the display of learn- 
ing ; there shall be no discussion of knotty points ; he 
will not write a thesis, or engage in a controversy, or 
quote the opinions of contending fathers in a dry light 
of "unprofitable and ineffective contemplation": he 
will make a living book, and address it to those "who 
can believe and love," not to those that can merely 
" consider and love." He has the boldest views about 
his literary mission. He will not scold or argue, 
he will entertain. He is afraid neither of the word nor 
the idea ; let us be equally bold, and admit that his 
design is to please, even to enthrall. He rates the 
theologians with their narrow range of intellectual 
interest. He says that it is far wiser to read Homer, 
^Eschylus, and Euripides than to bury one's self in the 
patristic triflings of the schoolmen. 

He was not ignorant of the scandal which his book 
would cause. It was not thought more decent for a 
churchman to appear without his Latinity upon him 
than to go up into the pulpit in secular habit. Even 
Chillingworth had been blamed for pursuing his 
theme on lines too logical, without the constant applica- 
tion of tags from the Church authorities ; he had been 
roundly accused of want of "learning." It required 
immense courage on Taylor's part to defy all the 
criticism of his class, and fold away his unquestioned 
erudition as a robe not fit to be worn on this particular 
occasion. He says ' : I have despised my own reputa- 
tion"; he has written a popular book, " embossed with 
unnecessary but graceful ornament." He knows that 
his clerical brethren will be scandalised, but he believes 
that he is divinely led. "My spark," he cries, "may 
grow greater by kindling my brother's taper, and God 



58 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

may be glorified in us both." So he bravely puts forth 
the earliest modern treatise of popular piety, "inter- 
mixing something of pleasure with the use," and not 
shrinking from the hope that his readers will find in 
it that "which will better entertain their spirits than 
a romance." The result was a noble and too-often 
forgotten manual which was the pioneer of a whole 
literature of piety. 

The Great Exemplar is a celebration of the beauty of 
the Lord Jesus, God and Man. The up-raised, ecstatic 
movement of the paragraphs betrays the enthusiasm of 
the writer ; he is Christ-possessed. The most gracious 
voice then to be heard in England is lifted like that of 
a nightingale above the frogs and ravens of the age. 
The form he adopts is interesting; it is cunningly 
devised to sustain and divert the attention, to prevent 
weariness, to prolong the pleasure of the reader by 
division and variety. It opens with a preface, one of 
Taylor's exquisitely winning introductions, in which 
the great family of Man is described, the necessity 
of discipline in its organism demonstrated, and Chris- 
tianity shown to be the most perfect law conceivable 
for its direction. Then, after an exhortation to the 
imitation of Jesus, the romance begins. 

The string on which the whole sequence of pearls 
is hung is the narrative of the life of Christ on earth. 
The author tells the story as he chooses. There is no 
attempt at Biblical criticism, even as in those days 
it was understood; no dealing with difficulties of 
parallel Evangelists ; no weighing of evidence. Taylor 
selects such versions of the narrative as best suit his 
purpose, not shrinking from the traditions of a later 
age, if they attract him. For instance, he accepts 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 59 

without a question the legend of the prostration of 
the Egyptian gods when the Infant crossed the border. 
If an incident inflames his imagination, he lingers over 
it as long as he chooses ; he weaves his fancy, for 
instance, for page after page, around the apparition 
of the Star of Epiphany. What he dwells upon, ex- 
clusively, is the imaginative and the pathetic. He 
wishes to draw men away from the weariness of con- 
troversy to the exquisite mysteries of pure religion. 

But he knows that sustained rhetoric fatigues the 
mind. He is careful to vary his theme. Accordingly, 
after each section of his narrative, he applies that frag- 
ment of the story to a disquisition on its practical 
bearing upon life, to general remarks about men's 
religious duty as illustrated by what he has just 
described. He rivets the attention of his readers by 
abrupt application of the history to the needs of 
modern society, to the family, to the state, to friend- 
ship and to the conduct of affairs. Nor is this enough 
to secure the cunning variety of his design, which is 
further gained by the introduction of short prayers, 
each like a gush of music. In these devotions, the 
most exquisite of their kind in the English language, 
Jeremy Taylor has had no rival. They display, in the 
most complete manner, the delicate wholesomeness of 
his conscience and the inimitable distinction of his 
style. Nowhere does he open a well of English more 
undefiled than in his admirable private prayers. 

It has been made a matter for regret that all the 
early sermons of Jeremy Taylor (for the lecture on 
Gunpowder Plot was no true sermon) are lost to us. 
The regret is needless; they are certainly embedded 
in The Great Exemplar. The careful reader will 



60 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

distinguish twenty "discourses " in the body of that 
work, and we may be sure that each of these was 
preached from a pulpit. It is obvious that it was the 
consideration of the rare originality and beauty of some 
of these sermons which inspired Lord Northampton 
with his fortunate idea of urging Jeremy Taylor to 
weave around them a popular life of Christ. Internal 
evidence would alone be sufficient to persuade us of 
this fact, were there not a point of external evidence 
which confirms it. Some years after Taylor's death, 
two manuscript sermons of his were discovered, and pub- 
lished in 1675 : these are known as Christ's Yoke an Easy 
Yoke and The Gate to Heaven a strait Gate. They were 
issued together, with a new portrait of the bishop, and 
as having been supplied by "a person of honour yet 
living," probably the third Earl of Northampton, who 
did not die until 1681. Of these sermons, on examina- 
tion, the first in its entirety, and portions of the second, 
are found in the mass of The Great Exemplar. They 
were inadvertently printed, as novelties, and no doubt 
from copies left behind him by Taylor in his flight to 
Wales in 1644. 

It would be idle to pretend that there are not flaws in 
the execution of this wonderful book. It is not sus- 
tained throughout at the very high level of its finest 
sections. At its best, it is written with enchanting 
fluidity and sweetness, the bright, elastic phrase leaping 
into light. But we begin already to perceive that 
Jeremy Taylor has two manners, the one far less 
attractive than the other. When he says :— 

"Filling the rooms of the understanding with airy and 
ineffective notions is just such an excellency as it is in a man 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 61 

to imitate the voice of birds ; at his very best the nightingale 
shall excel him " ; 

or, 

" God's authority is like sacred fire in an earthen censer, as 
holy as if it were kindled with the fanning of a cherub's wing, 
or placed just under the propitiatory : upon a golden altar," 

the effect is, as Coleridge has excellently put it, 
dazzling. But this highly ornate manner often gives 
place to a style that is rigorously plain and simple, and 
this latter is apt to decline to the pedestrian. It does 
so decline, too often, in what the reader then comes to 
regard as the interminable prolongation of The Great 
Exemplar. Indeed, to be plain, the excessive length 
of the book is to-day its principal, and perhaps its 
hopeless fault. 

This was not a fault at the time of its composition. 
In the middle of the seventeenth century, people pre- 
ferred their books of entertainment to be of immense 
length. The kind of popular literature which Jeremy 
Taylor directly challenged in The Great Exemplar was 
the heroic novel recently introduced from France. In 
his prison, Charles I. was now reading the Cassandra 
of Calprenede, a romance in no fewer than twenty- 
three volumes. Dorothy Osborne, in these same years, 
was making lists of the lovers in the interminable 
Almahide, and in the elephantine Grand Cyrus of M lle de 
Scud^ry. Hitherto these huge books had been chiefly 
read in French, but the tide of translation was begin- 
ning to set in. Polexandre had been published in 
English in 1647, and Artamenes was shortly to follow, 
in six colossal folio volumes. Bulk and prolixity were 

1 Mercy-seat. 



62 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

no disadvantages in that age of the Commonwealth, 
when Puritan asceticism had sealed up the sources of 
genial enjoyment. In the country all festivities and 
sports had been abolished ; in the town, with edicts of 
vindictive ferocity, all play-houses and places of amuse- 
ment had been closed. The only entertainment left 
was literature, and people could not have it too elabor- 
ately prolonged. Yet even Jeremy Taylor, except in 
one notable instance, was never again so inordinately 
lengthy. 

His holy romance, since he permits us to style it so, 
was eminently successful. But it did not pass entirely 
without attack. Jeremy Taylor, the most ingenuous 
of writers, was impudently accused of a literary fraud. 
It was asserted that his book was not his own, but 
merely translated from a folio Vita Jesu Christi, printed 
at Paris in 1509, by Ludolphus of Saxony. There 
seems to be always somebody ready to embark on 
these Shandean investigations, eager "to pluck my 
mother's thread-paper out of Slawkenbergius' book." 
Ludolphus, even in those days, cannot have been an 
author of easy reference, but a century and a half later 
Heber succeeded in discovering him, and allayed sus- 
picion. "It is scarcely possible," Heber says, "to 
find two books written on any one subject which have 
so few coincidences of arrangement, sentiment, or 
expression." Deeply imprinted in the human breast 
is the desire to prove that every work was not written 
by its own author but by another man. Those who 
are convinced that all the poetry and drama in our 
literature was the composition of Bacon, should not 
pause until they have proved that all our theology was 
written by Ludolphus of Saxony. 



ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 63 

A deep serenity of spirit is the key-note of The Great 
Exemplar ; but it is not fantastic to read in the eighth 
section of the first part, where a curious effect of alarm 
and agitation is produced, a record of Taylor's feelings 
in the midst of the revolt of 1648. He speaks of the 
signs of the times, " no sermons there but when soli- 
tude is made popular, and the city moves into the 
wilderness ; no comforts of a public religion, or visible 
remonstrances of the communion of saints. Of all 
the kinds of spiritual mercy, only one can there 
properly be exercised, and of the corporeal none at 
all." But, as he presently remembers, "the passions 
^f the sensitive soul are like an exhalation," and when 
the danger had passed by, his peace returned. The 
first part of The Great Exemplar is dedicated, in terms 
of unimpaired affection, to Lord Hatton of Kirby, but 
this is almost the last occasion on which we meet the 
name of this nobleman in our narrative. Already in 
August 1648 he had withdrawn to Paris, where he 
began by keeping open house for the Emigre's, but soon 
fell into povert}^, and suffered a degradation of char- 
acter from which he never recovered. So long as 
his son Christopher remained at Newton Hall School, 
this would be a link between Taylor and his former 
patron. 

A persistent legend connects Jeremy Taylor with 
the last hours of Charles I. One of his descendants 
possesses a watch said to have belonged to the king ; 
and two diamonds and a ruby, set in a ring, which are 
now in New York, are supposed to be royal gifts made 
on the road to execution. We are told, also, of "a few 
pearls and rubies which had ornamented the ebony 
case in which the king kept his Bible." Without 



64 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

throwing any doubt upon the authenticitjr of these 
relics, it may be observed that Charles I. may have 
presented them to his former chaplain on various and 
less tragic occasions than that of his death. It is 
difficult to find room for Jeremy Taylor at that last 
memorable scene. t On the 23rd of December 1648, 
Charles was conveyed from Hurst Castle, closely guarded, 
to Windsor. It is possible that certain friends might 
be smuggled in to take their leave of him before the 
19th of January, when he was brought up to St. 
James's Palace. But up to the latter date, Charles 
had not arrived at such a realisation of his fate as 
would lead him to divide his possessions into keep- 
sakes. After it, and up till the fatal 30th, even Juxon 
and Herbert could scarcely pass through the rude 
guard of soldiers, smoking and drinking in the very 
precincts of the king's bedroom. One of the objects 
mentioned above is said to bear the date, August 1647. 
This, we have been recently told, "is evidently too 
early." It appears to me, on the contrary, the date 
most easy to reconcile with history. In August 1647 
the king was at Putney, permitted to see his friends, 
in comparative liberty and comfort. He had a few 
weeks previously been reading Liberty of Prophesying 
with extreme interest, and had been unable on all 
points to coincide with the views expressed in it. He 
naturally may have wished to discuss it with its author. 
For the moment, everything was quiet in South Wales ; 
for the moment Cromwell was anxious to indulge and 
conciliate Charles. No conjectural date for the last 
meeting between Jeremy Taylor and his royal master 
seems to offer less difficulty than this legendary one of 
August 1647. But that he went up to London early 



n.] THE CIVIL WAR 65 

in 1649, partly to carry the manuscript of The Great 
Exemplar to the publishers, and partly to see Juxon, 
Duppa, and other friends is highly probable. He is 
said to have been consulted about the king's papers, 
and to have suggested the title of the EiJcon Basilike. 



CHAPTEE III 

RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 
(1650-1653) 

The retreat into which Jeremy Taylor had now with- 
drawn, under conditions the most fortunate which his 
genius could have desired, is situated in a part of South 
Wales, which is now very beautiful, and which there 
is reason to believe was then more beautiful still. 
Golden Grove was a large house, standing in its own 
undulating park, on the south side of the Towey, but 
about a mile from that river. It looked across the 
valley to a still lovelier and more romantic estate, 
Dynevor Castle. It was a little to the east of Grongar 
Hill, and shared the view which Dyer described some 
seventy years later in his famous poem, being situated 
in the midst of that 

" long and level lawn, 
On which a dark hill, steep and high, 
Holds and charms the wandering eye ; 
Deep are his feet in Towey's flood, 
His sides are clothed with waving wood ; 
And ancient towers crown his brow, 
That cast an awful look below." 

This was the scene which rose before Jeremy Taylor 
every morning, as he left Golden Grove, struck north- 
ward across the meadows, crossed the winding Towey 



chap, in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 67 

at some fording-place or by the bridge to Llangathen, 
and ascended, past the ruin which Dyer describes, 
round 

" Whose ragged walls the ivy creeps, 
And with her arms from falling keeps," 

on his way to the school-house at Newton Hall. 

The ancient market-town of Llandilovawr was some 
three miles off to the north-east, and from it, skirting 
the palings of Golden Grove park, ran the high road 
south to Llanelly. At that time the valley of the 
Towey seems to have been richly wooded, though later 
on the timber was destroyed, and re-plantation was so 
neglected, that late in the eighteenth century it bore 
a very naked aspect. In the period when Jeremy 
Taylor lived there, the whole surroundings of Golden 
Grove must have been romantic in the extreme, and 
their delicate and picturesque beauty was in perfect 
harmony with his florid genius. No doubt, in his 
day, the 

"woods, where echo talks, 
The gardens trim, the terrace-walks, 
The wildernesses, fragrant brakes, 
The gloomy bowers and shining lakes " 

of the Towey valley were, if possible, still more en- 
chanting than when Dyer sang of them in the dawn 
of the naturalistic revival. 

The church of Llanfihangel - Aberbythych, where 
Taylor's friend, Nicholson, ministered, stood at the 
western confines of the park, and was but a few 
minutes' distance from the rooms placed at Taylor's 
disposal at the mansion. Here, with his school and 
his ministrations in the great house, and with long 
talks with a few wise friends, Taylor lay protected 



68 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

from the world for many happy years, surrounded 
by every innocent pleasure, and left to the unbroken 
cultivation of his eloquence and his fancy. It is to 
this beautiful retreat, in a rich valley of South Wales, 
that we owe the ripest products of his intellect. The 
stamp of the physical beauty which surrounded him 
is imprinted upon the best and happiest of his writings, 
and we may say that Jeremy Taylor was nourished by 
the Muses in the park of Golden Grove, as the goat- 
herd Comatas was fed with honey by the bees while 
he lay imprisoned in his master's cedarn chest. 1 

The conditions of Taylor's life at Golden Grove, his 
extremely sequestered habits, the narrow circle in 
which he laboured during so many years, his direct 
responsibility as private chaplain to the lord and lady 
of the place, give us authority to treat as autobiographi- 
cal certain phrases in the books which he wrote in 
Wales, which, if he had lived in the world of London, 
or in a wide and uncritical society elsewhere, might be 
taken as conventional. For instance, when he says 
that every truly pious man " sets apart some solemn 
time every year, in which, for the time quitting all 
worldly business, he may attend wholly to fasting and 
prayer, and the dressing of his soul by confessions, 
meditations and attendances upon God," it is obvious 
that he must himself have made such an annual retreat 
his practice, or any one of the few inhabitants of Llan- 
fihangel-Aberbythych could have charged him with in- 
consistency There is the same evidence that he was 

1 A rough engraving of Golden Grove adorns the 1657 edition 
of the Polemical Discourses. The house was entirely burned 
down in 1/29. In 1816 an avenue of trees in the park was still 
traditionally known as Jeremy Taylor's Walk. 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 69 

in the habit, several times during the day, of slipping 
aside to " make frequent colloquies or short discoursings 
between God and his own soul," on which occasions, 
as we know that he did not approve of extempore 
prayer, he certainly made use of some of the innumer- 
able short "devotions" which form so considerable a 
part of his published writings. Again, when he speaks, 
not once or twice, of the advantage of getting out of 
bed "sometimes" so as "to see the preparation which 
the sun makes when he is coming forth from his 
chambers of the east," it is hardly unreasonable to feel 
assured that these remarks reflect one of his personal 
habits. These little touches must not be pushed too 
far, but they help to build up for us a portrait of the 
man. 

The earliest literary exercise on which Jeremy Taylor 
was occupied after the death of the king was a practi- 
cal work on conduct, almost a technical directory or 
manual, the celebrated Rule and Exercises of Holy Living. 
This was published in 1650, with a long titlepage ex- 
plaining that the treatise dealt with " the means and 
instruments of obtaining every virtue, and the remedies 
against every vice, and considerations serving to the 
resisting all temptations, together with prayers con- 
taining the Whole Duty of a Christian," a summary 
which neatly defines the contents of the volume. It is 
not very easy to speak critically of this famous book, 
which is certainly the best known of all Taylor's works, 
and that which represents his thought and language 
most directly to the majority of readers. It has been 
incessantly reprinted, and is to be found in most house- 
holds where books of any gravity of composition are 
admitted. So widely circulated is it, indeed, that its 



70 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

form and tenour have without doubt tended to create 
a certain notion of Jeremy Taylor's style and manner. 
It is not easy, however, to find terms in which to ac- 
knowledge the value of the Holy Living, and yet to 
deprecate its being taken as an example of the habitual 
or of the best side of its author's writing. But it is 
necessary to do this, and to insist on the defects of the 
book. 

These defects rise out of its practical merits. It 
is a didactic guide to the holy life. It is above all 
things technical. It is "fitted to all occasions, fur- 
nished for all necessities " ; it is . a guide to per- 
fection, a map of all the virtues pushed to their 
most inaccessible altitude. The author admits no 
excuse for any kind of frailty ; he pleads throughout 
for the most austere and lofty practice as if it were 
easily to be obtained. His ideal saint walks in spotless 
glory along the mountain-tops, stepping upon virgin 
snow. In order to enhance this imaginary perfection, 
the preacher treats all forms of human weakness with 
disdain, admits no pardonable frailties, demands the debt 
of law to be paid in full, to the last farthing. This is 
a point of view which may lend itself to admirable 
effects in the hands of a theological philosopher, but 
this Jeremy Taylor was not. He was a very great 
writer, but it will scarcely be pretended that he was a 
great thinker. The scope of the Holy Living is one 
peculiarly unfavourable to a writer of Taylor's genius. 
It is essentially impersonal and objective ; it is all 
written from the outside, in general terms. But we 
have already suspected, and we shall have abundant 
opportunity of proving as we proceed, that Jeremy 
Taylor's treatment of conduct is apt to be obvious, 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 71 

trite, and starved unless he has occasion to enrich it 
with the fruits of his own experience, or to colour it 
with his own vision. An impersonal work of Jeremy 
Taylor, therefore, sinks immediately to the second 
level in a critical survey, even although its practical 
value, its " usefulness " may have kept it on the highest 
level in the ordinary life of the Church. Let us have 
the courage to say it — high as the devotional value is 
— the Holy Living cannot be regarded as one of its 
author's principal contributions to literature. 

It has, however, parts of great passion and beauty, 
where the individual note is not lacking. The dedica- 
tion, for instance, is a piece of splendid invective, a 
lamentation over the miseries which followed 1649, and 
an implied denunciation of the men who caused them. 
The author breaks out in a cry of angry grief : — 

" I have lived to see religion painted upon banners, and 
thrust out of churches, and the temple turned into a taber- 
nacle, and that tabernacle made ambulatory, and covered with 
skins of beasts and torn curtains, and God to be worshipped, 
not as He is, the Father of our Lord Jesus, an afflicted Prince, 
the King of sufferings, . . . but rather as the Lord of hosts." 

But this wail presently dies away in resignation. 
No man shall have reason to be angry with Taylor 
"for refusing to mingle in his unnecessary or vicious 
persecution." He bows the head, he accepts retirement, 
poverty, humiliation. The note sinks deeper and 
deeper. He will neither strive nor cry. In earlier 
years he fought for his prince and for his church, but 
what is there now left to contend about ? Life is 
empty and barren; there is nothing to expect or to 
fear. He is no longer apprehensive, no longer hopeful ; 
the king is dead, the bishops are dishonoured, the 



72 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Church degraded. What is there left to struggle for, 
since the game is up 1 In this mood he prefers to lay 
down a clear creed and directory for conduct. In the 
new naked era which has set in, men are bewildered 
how to live. He will draft regulations for behaviour 
after the flood, for men who crowd back to the village 
only to find priest and altar, bell and prayer-book, 
swept away. We shall not appreciate the appeal which 
the Holy Living made to Anglican minds, if we do 
not recognise the fierce and ironical resignation of its 
despairing, royalist preface. 

Of the general plan of the treatise, it must be said 
that it has the formal defects of all such cut-and-dried 
formularies, but especially of those of the seventeenth 
century. Its four main chapters deal with holiness, 
and how to practise and maintain it; with sobriety 
under five or six heads ; with justice, — a chapter which 
has been praised as a specimen of " casuistry in its 
highest and noblest sense"; and with the duties of 
religion. The great difficulty which lies before those 
who unreservedly praise the Holy Living is the lack of 
clear reasoning in the mind of the author. He is 
eloquent about the vices, but rather vague and ineffec- 
tive in his definitions of those which do not particularly 
assail him. It is amusing to see how very sensible and 
cautious ne is in his treatment of excessive indulgence 
in the pleasures of the table. Lord Carbery, one is 
tempted to believe, was something of a gourmand. It 
must be remembered, if this criticism should seem to 
be touched with flippancy, that all the directions for the 
conduct of life were bound to be either entirely vague, or 
else marked with a curious precision, in consequence of 
the author's office as private chaplain in a great house, 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 73 

isolated from the rest of mankind. Hence, the extreme 
looseness and indefiniteness of his diatribes against 
temptations which were not likely to fall in the way of 
his small circle of auditors. 

Nor, in this connection, must we pass without one 
word of discrimination over the section on carnal 
voluptuousness, which he found it proper to include. 
Even as compared with the language of other seven- 
teenth-century theologians, who were anything but 
mealy-mouthed, Taylor here is disagreeably broad and 
rough. It is useless to deny, what is an historical 
fact, that this part of his book has been a stumbling- 
block to hundreds of readers. Taylor was conscious, 
himself, that his treatment of this delicate theme would 
be distasteful to many, and might possibly give offence. 
He apologises for it, and his apology is not happy ; he 
says : — 

" If any man will snatch the pure taper from my hand and 
hold it to the devil, he will only burn his own fingers, but 
shall not rob me of the reward of my care and good inten- 
tion." 

This shows that he had been inclined, and perhaps 
advised, to omit or to modify his expressions. It is a 
pity that he did not act on the suggestion, for these 
paragraphs do not make for edification. Nor can a 
reader to-day forbear gently reminding Jeremy Taylor 
of what he has himself to say, so wisely and liberally, 
on this question of discretion, in the sermon called 
"The Good and Evil Tongue." It needs a sterner 
satirist or else a more human and pitiful moralist than 
he was to deal successfully with so very embarrassing 
a matter. But the section was needed in his formal 



74 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

scheme, and he felt obliged to include it. In the 
course of a chapter which we may be disposed to regret, 
however, occurs a mystical paragraph about virginity 
which we should have been unwilling indeed to 
spare : — 

" Virginity is a life of angels, the enamel of the soul, the 
huge advantage of religion, the great opportunity for the re- 
tirements of devotion, and, being empty of cares, it is full of 
prayers." 

From another passage in the same chapter, we learn 
for the first time that Jeremy Taylor was a believer in 
the possibility of contemporary witchcraft. 

A literary feature which is very strongly marked in 
the Holy Living is the author's dependence at this time 
on the poets of antiquity. His arguments against the 
vices are often taken, for pages together, entirely from 
the Latin and Greek classics, and sometimes a charm- 
ing turn is given to a phrase borrowed straight from 
^Eschylus or Martial. The systematic evolution of his 
theme, divided in the provoking seventeenth-century 
manner into heads and numbered paragraphs — which 
Sir William Cornwallis, in his Essays, had amusingly 
described as " the divisions that neat scholars use to 
tie up the breeches of an argument or an oration with," 
— disturbs the reader's pleasure, and we are not 
troubled to charge the preacher with inconsistency 
when he throws this tiresome apparatus away, or 
forgets it for awhile, as in the noble apostrophe on 
divine love in the fourth chapter, or that on contented- 
ness in the second chapter, where we come upon 
enchanting Horatian phrases, in the author's true 
manner, such as : — 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 75 

" Corn from Sardinia, herds of Calabrian cattle, meadows 
through which pleasant Liris glides, silks from Tyrus, and 
golden chalices to drown my health in, are nothing but instru- 
ments of vanity or sin, and suppose a disease in the soul of 
him that longs for them, or admires them." 

He does not divide his subject very consistently, 
and falls into illogical overlappings and repetitions of 
it, which sometimes suggest such patchwork as we have 
noted, though there carried out with far greater skill, 
in The Great Exemplar. Towards the end of the treatise, 
Taylor inveighs again very strongly against the 
efficacy of death-bed repentances, an attitude which 
was frequently to recur in his writings, and to awaken 
much animadversion. Finally, he adds to the treatise, 
and closes with, an essay which is evidently of inde- 
pendent composition, a grave and harmonious prepara- 
tion to the receiving of the Holy Sacrament. Such 
in its variegated literary aspect is the Holy Living, a 
treatise to which, from the purely intellectual and 
artistic points of view, certain exceptions have to be 
made, but which has been used for edification by pious 
churchmen for two hundred and fifty years. 

The sequestered stillness of Jeremy Taylor's life was 
now to be broken in upon by some tragical events. 
It is evident that a very warm feeling of mutual 
esteem had grown up between the divine and his 
patron's wife. Frances, Countess of Carbery, was the 
"tender providence that shrouded him under her wings," 
and her wisdom, goodness, and practical ability had 
come to be the mainstays of his fortune. This prop 
was removed by her sudden death at Golden Grove, on 
the 9th of October 1650. The atmosphere of Oxhey, 
where she was brought up, had been contemplative and 



76 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

intellectual ; her training was strict and austere ; and 
we are told, although the exact meaning of these words 
is doubtful, that "God had provided a severe and 
angry education to chastise the forwardnesses of a 
young spirit and a fair fortune." She married Lord 
Carbery in June 1637, being very youthful at the 
time. At the date of her death she was still in flore 
(etatis, probably not more than two or three and thirty 
years of age. Whatever vicissitudes her early life may 
have suffered, her career at Golden Grove seems to 
have been tranquil and pleasant enough. She was 
very clever and tactful; a placens uxor, she had an 
excellent influence over her husband, who adored 
her; she was a charming talker, and eminently easy 
of access — conversationis suavissimce. As her years 
advanced, she became more remarkable for "severity, 
modesty, and close religion," and of so exquisite a 
moral delicacy that "you might as well have suspected 
the sun to smell of the poppy that he looks on, as 
that she could have been a person apt to be sullied 
by the breath of a foul question." Her constitution 
was undermined by a too-constant burden of child- 
bearing. During her brief married life, she brought 
into the world ten children, of whom eight survived 
her, and from the bed of her latest daughter, Althamia, 
she never rose again. It appears that she had an 
intuition of her approaching end, and she told Jeremy 
Taylor, before Althamia was born, that she had to 
"go a great way in a little time," and must trim her 
lamp and be ready to depart. 

Accordingly, long before there was any sign of 
mortal weakness of body, Lady Carbery, having "a 
strange secret persuasion that the bringing this child 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 77 

should be her last scene of life," passed through a 
paroxysm of terror, which presently gave way to 
resignation, except when she thought that her death 
might be attended with agonising pain, of which she 
had a constitutional dread. Her fears passed away, 
however, and the birth of her child was normal, but 
she never regained her strength, and faded painlessly 
out of life, merely shivering twice, as with " two fits of 
a common ague." Jeremy Taylor, who attended her 
in her last moments with spiritual consolation, wrote 
for her monument a long Latin inscription, and the 
following English portrait, which he calls a drawing 
in water colours : — 

"She was ... of a temperate, plain and natural diet, 
without curiosity or an intemperate palate. She spent less 
time in dressing than many servants. Her recreations were 
little and seldom, her prayers often, her reading much. She 
was of a most noble and charitable soul ; a great lover of 
honourable actions, and as great a despiser of base things. 
Hugely loving to oblige others, she was very unwilling to be 
in arrear to any upon the stock of courtesies and liberality. 
So free in all acts of favour, that she would not stay to hear 
herself thanked. . . . She was an excellent friend, and hugely 
dear to very many, especially to the best and most discerning 
persons ; to all that conversed with her, and could understand 
her great worth and sweetness. She was of an honourable, 
nice and tender reputation ; and of the pleasures of the world, 
which were laid before her in heaps, she took a very small 
and inconsiderable share." 

This passage is quoted from the Funeral Sermon 
which Taylor preached at her grave, and immediately 
published in quarto. This address was a model of its 
kind, and was widely circulated, finding admirers 
among the large public of those to whom Lady 



78 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Carbery was an object of no interest, but who accepted 
the sermon as a piece of mortuary art, like the elaborate 
verse-elegies for which several poets of a slightly earlier 
age, but particularly Francis Quarles, had been famous. 
The Funeral Sermon at tJie Obsequies of the Countess of 
Carbery marks, however, an advance upon the con- 
ventional type of elegy in prose and verse, in that it 
offers no preposterous panegyric of the deceased, but 
a reasonable and thoughtful enumeration of her 
qualities. It took the form of a biography, and we 
may note that it is the pattern upon which Rust was 
closely to model his own invaluable tribute to its 
author. 

Taylor speaks with approbation of those "women 
of noble birth and great fortunes" who "nurse their chil- 
dren, look to the affairs of the house, visit poor cottages, 
and relieve their necessities, are courteous in the neigh- 
bourhood, learn in silence of their husbands or their 
spiritual guides, read good books, pray often and speak 
little," and devote themselves "to good housewifery 
and charitable provisions for their family and neigh- 
bourhood." This was obviously a picture of the useful 
and active life of the only " woman of noble birth and 
great fortunes" whom his seclusion at Golden Grove 
gave him an opportunity of observing. Nor does it 
appear that, with these agreeable duties, Lady Carbery 
combined the temper of a fanatic ; she held it lawful 
to relax and unbend the bow, like "St. John, who 
recreated himself with sporting with a tame partridge," 
if we may believe Cassianus. On the whole, we have 
a charming impression presented to us of the great lady, 
whose mind and soul were so closely watched for some 
five quiet years by her delicately appreciative chaplain. 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 79 

When Lady Carbery died, Taylor was already en- 
gaged in a literary work of great importance, on which 
the character and enthusiasm of that admirable woman 
had put their stamp. We have noticed already, and 
shall have again to observe, a curious docility in the 
intellectual disposition of Jeremy Taylor, the result, 
perhaps, of a certain timidity, which usually demanded 
a stimulus from without to start him on an enterprise. 
We have already seen how much he owed to the 
initiation first of Laud and then of Lord Northampton ; 
at Golden Grove it was evidently Lady Carbery who 
was his muse and his directing genius. Among other 
designs of her suggesting was that of a collection of 
his sermons, so arranged as to serve as a manual of 
piety for a whole year. This was a matter in which 
Taylor was slow to act ; he was not sure that such a 
publication would be prudent or acceptable. But 
"the appetites of the hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness" of that "dear lady, that rare soul," would brook 
no objections, and when she died, it was being prepared 
for the press. 

Taylor immediately issued an instalment, in the form 
of Twenty-eight Sermons preached at Golden Grove, in 1651. 
This is the second, or "Summer" half of the entire 
work, the first part of which, the "Winter" section, 
appeared in 1653; the two were united in all sub- 
sequent reprints, under the title of Eniautos. 1 This 
is the main storehouse or miscellany of Taylor's 
homilies. As we hold it, at present, however, the 
two parts are reversed from the original order of 
publication, and the history of the book thus obscured. 
Although Advent Sunday, of course, begins the eccle- 
1 That is to say, ' A Year ' (iuiavros). 



80 JEREMY TAYLOR - [chap. 

siastical year, in dealing with the Eniautos we ought 
to turn to the sermon for Whitsunday, and to consider 
that the collection begins there. It is important, too, 
to read first the dedication to the "Summer" half, and 
to bear in mind that it refers to events which were 
more than two years earlier than those dealt with in 
what is now the opening address. If we do this, we 
see that in 1651 Jeremy Taylor published his Twenty- 
eight Sermons, as a legacy due to Lord Carbery from his 
countess, but reluctantly, timidly, almost despairingly. 
He expected no praise for them ; he feared that their 
publication could little serve his reputation. By often 
reading over and revising these essays, the pleasure 
which he took in their composition had all evaporated. 
He had "begun to grow weary and displeased " with 
his own oratory, and he was very doubtful whether it 
would either please or edify others. 

Part of this was due to physical depression of spirits, 
no doubt; part of it to the excessive disappointment 
caused by the sudden removal of her for whom he had 
prepared the work, and to whom he had looked for- 
ward as its earliest and most ardent reader. But it 
was an attitude too complex and too unusual to be 
easily explained. This was far from being the cus- 
tomary pose of the seventeenth-century divine, whether 
he was Presbyterian or Jansenist, English or French. 
As a rule no shadow of a suspicion that his publication 
could be unwelcome to the pious agitated the Boanerges 
of the moment. Not to welcome his sermons was to 
show how gravely you were in need of them. But 
Jeremy Taylor was not like the clamorous Rutherfords 
on the one hand ; nor on the other was he like such 
fashionable preachers as Massillon, who, in telling M Jle 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 81 

de Scudery about the sermons he was preparing for the 
press, assured her that when she read them she would 
fancy herself listening to St. Augustine or to St. Bernard. 
It is curious that a collection of addresses more magni- 
ficent than any which a theologian of the English 
Church had hitherto addressed to the world should 
appear with the painful and faltering dedication of the 
Twenty-Eight Sermons of 1651. 

But there were reasons for Taylor's reluctance. Re 
was afraid of the results of withdrawing the personal 
element. These addresses had been written for and 
delivered in the presence of a very small cluster of 
peculiarly refined and highly-cultivated persons, who 
had a strong admiration for the preacher. Jeremy 
Taylor had been flattered for his delivery, for his 
address, doubtless for his golden voice and his angelic 
aspect, since compliments were not stinted in those 
days. He had been praised "as you should crown a 
conqueror with a garland of roses, or a bride with 
laurel." He had, by all testimony, what Bossuet 
defines as "une eloquence vive et impetueuse qui 
entrainait" those who listened, and entranced them. 
And he was carried on himself, and felt the Delphic 
fumes in his brain. But it is one thing to make 
great music "unto a little clan," and another to 
address, in cold print, the world at large. Taylor, in 
his delicate hermitage, shrank from the idea of a 
publicity which might wound him. 

His orthodoxy, too, might be called in question, 
and, a little later on, it was. He would not care much 
for what the Parliamentarian divines would say, but 
the criticism of men like Duppa and Sheldon, his own 
friends and fellow-sufferers, made him anxious. There 



82 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

was, for instance, his disbelief in the efficacy of 
death-bed repentance, which was becoming a sort of 
fanaticism with him. There were other matters, some 
of which will come before us in the course of this 
inquiry, although the nature of it is literary and not 
theological, in which Taylor held and was obliged con- 
scientiously to advance views not shared by the rest 
of the High Church clergy of his time. He would 
naturally be nervous lest these should lead to con- 
troversy, for which, at the moment, his mood parti- 
cularly disinclined him. 

A profound respect for the limitations and apparatus 
of religious oratory is strongly marked in these 
sermons. Jeremy Taylor was distinguished from 
those English preachers who had most prominently 
preceded him in that he was in no sense an impro- 
visatore. His best sermons — those which we possess 
in the completed Eniautos — are composed with extreme 
care ; on every page they bear evidence of the long 
delays of art. His own injunctions to those who 
preach dwell on the need of competency, of labour, 
of deliberation. It is important to observe that he 
arrived at the full stature of his genius at a moment 
when the English Church had no need of a Tertullian. 
In 1651 no obligation lay upon one of the hunted 
ministers of a fallen Episcopacy to strike at such 
vices as ambition, or gallantry, or the greed of gold. 
What was wanted, in that melancholy hour, was a 
physician of souls, one who had the skill to comfort 
the racked nerves and pour oil into the aching wounds 
of the Church. This precisely suited the temperament 
of Jeremy Taylor, who was nothing of a pontiff and 
nothing of a satirist, but whose seraphic gentleness 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 83 

exhaled itself in the deep and comfortable balms of 
consolation. 

Accordingly, in the Sermons of Taylor we find a 
studied avoidance of the fury of the preachers of an 
earlier time. All is in the spirit of St. Chrysostom; 
these are aurea dicta. His acquaintance with the human 
heart inspired homilies which were addressed, not to 
indifferent or hostile listeners, but to those who were 
greedy of pious counsel. He advances to his task with 
tact, with insinuation, with an energetic imagery which 
will fetter a refined fancy and uplift it. In those days 
the sermon was beginning to be a literary instrument, 
and Taylor bends his genius to use it so as to correct 
bad taste as well as bad morals. His Sermons give a 
curious impression of cosmopolitan distinction. He 
constantly introduces a phrase, — such as " we walk by 
the obelisk, and meditate in piazzas, that they that 
meet us may talk of us," — which seems in a moment 
to lift us completely out of the provincial environment 
of the ordinary Anglican divine of the period. And 
Taylor does this without falling, on the other hand, 
into the affectation of the "pretty sermon," into that 
rainbow-coloured Marinism which was all the mode 
in London, and of which Anthony a Wood has pre- 
served ridiculous examples. Taylor's appeal to the 
conscience is always direct, and he throws his art, the 
unequalled beauty of his style, into the presentment 
of dogma, with a passion of strenuous piety. 

So, for instance, when we read, in "The Faith and 
Patience of the Saints " : — 

" Jesus was like the rainbow, which God set in the clouds 
as a sacrament to confirm a promise and establish a grace. 
He was half made of the glories of the light, and half of the 



84 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

moisture of a cloud. In His best days, He was but half 
triumph and half sorrow ; ' — 

the incomparable melody and delicacy of the phrase 
must no more be condemned as the screen of a conceit 
than must one of Shakespeare's unusual and pene- 
trating turns. It is beautiful, but it is true as well ; 
it bears thinking about; it illuminates, it does not 
astonish and obscure the idea by the glare of false 
ornament. 

The splendour of these Twenty-Eight Sermons is very 
striking. In no work of Jeremy Taylor's are there 
to be found so many images taken from light and 
colour and living creatures on the wing. He exercises 
every legitimate art of finished literary oratory, from 
the abrupt beginning, "And lose his own soul?" or 
"This is the epicure's proverb!" to the solemn and 
stately close. The curious reader will find that he almost 
invariably ends in a studied verbal harmony. Between 
these two extremes there is an infinite, but carefully 
balanced, variety of treatment. He is always endea- 
vouring to appeal to his auditors' common sense, to 
touch them by images from nature, by analogies from 
contemporary life. He is always careful to give a 
tangible form, if possible, to his abstract ideas, by 
a metaphor, or an illustration. Each of these sermons 
occupied about three-quarters of an hour in tranquil 
delivery, some a little less, none more than an hour. 
And this may lead us to a consideration of a point 
which has been frequently raised, For whom were 
these elaborate works of art intended 1 

It has been suggested that discourses as ^nished in 
form as those which Bossuet was, a decade later, to 
pronounce before the Court of Louis xiv. could not 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 85 

have been composed for a circle of acquaintances in a 
Welsh country-house. Heber himself acceded to this, 
and being confronted with the plain statement that 
Taylor's Eniautos was "preached at Golden Grove," 
started the theory, which has been generally accepted, 
that in preparing his sermons for the press he materi- 
ally changed them from "what he had delivered to 
his rustic auditory in "Wales," and that, as so delivered, 
the ornamental and philosophical portions were omitted. 
This I am by no means prepared to believe. First, 
because the sermons, as they were printed, were not 
longer, but decidedly shorter, than was the custom 
with such compositions, and secondly, because the 
"ornament" and "philosophy" are not of a nature 
which could be detached, but make a part of the 
integral texture. Moreover, no Welsh-speaking " rustic 
auditory" would be present in the private chapel of 
Golden Grove, but primarily the lord and lady of the 
place, with their pronounced appetite for the refine- 
ments of theological literature, and secondarily the 
other clergy from Newton Hall, and such neighbouring 
gentry as, in their religious isolation, would drive 
over in their equipages from distant parts of the 
country to be thus refreshed and delighted. 

To a discreet and enthusiastic auditory of this kind, 
the Eniautos would not sound too academical. It might 
even seem too popular. The recondite nature of the 
allusions would not appear excessive to persons accus- 
tomed to hear long passages of Greek and Latin recited 
from the fathers. Heber himself has noted that of 
Pococke, although one of the first scholars of the day, 
it was slightingly complained in his parish that, 
"though a kind and neighbourly man, he was no 



86 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Latinist," simply because he preached in homely Eng- 
lish. Jeremy Taylor seems, on more than one occasion, 
to express a certain apprehension of a similar blame. 
In his case, it might arise, however, not so much from 
his neglect of the patristic authorities as from his extra- 
ordinary fondness for dissolving little crystals of such 
very profane writers as Martial, Catullus, and Petronius 
in his holy discourse. Of this no more curious example 
can be pointed to than the way in which he has (in 
"The Spirit of Grace") built up a most brilliant 
summary of the mysteries of our faith on a basis so 
little to be anticipated as a tag from an ode of Anacreon. 
If the shock of Lady Carbery's death, striking 
" more suddenly than upon the poor slave that made 
sport upon the theatre," deeply affected Taylor's 
spirits, they were still further depressed by a blow 
which came even closer to him. Absolutely no light 
has hitherto been thrown on the movements of the 
wife whom he had married at Uppingham early in 
1639, but she had probably joined her husband at 
Llanfihangel in 1645. Their eldest child, William, 
had died at Uppingham in 1642 ; five others had come 
in rapid succession. The allusions to Mrs. Taylor, 
which can without overbold conjecture be traced in 
writings of her husband, are few. But there can be 
no doubt that she is the "affectionate wife" whom 
Taylor tenderly recalls, who, 

"when she hath been in fear of parting with her beloved 
husband, heartily desired of God his life or society upon any 
conditions that were not sinful, and chose to beg with him 
rather than to feast without him ; and the same person hath 
upon that consideration borne poverty nobly, when God hath 
heard her prayer in the other matter." 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 87 

It may be that Mrs. Taylor's health suffered a slow 
decline, for references to the burden of illness in a 
house, and its attendant fatigues and anxieties, are 
frequent in her husband's writings at this period. In 
a passage where the inconveniences of their poverty 
are plainly referred to, he adds, "sickness doth so 
often embitter the content of a family." It seems 
probable that the parents were not entirely of one 
mind about the education of children. In the Holy 
Dying he speaks with strange severity of the bad 
influence of mothers on their children : — 

" These soften them with kisses and imperfect noises, with 
the pap and breast-milk of soft endearments. They rescue 
them from tutors, and snatch them from discipline ; they 
desire to keep them fat and warm, and their feet dry and 
their bellies full ; and then the children govern, and cry, and 
prove fools and troublesome, so long as the feminine republic 
does endure." 

The modern reader will be all with Mrs. Taylor in 
this matter, and will surmise that if "the bold and 
valiant " divine had taken more pains to see that his 
little children's feet were dry, the dreadful mortality 
that presently pursued them might have been averted. 
But Jeremy Taylor is himself too human to be quite 
consistent, and in other places commends the physical 
care of little children. 

News of the death of Phoebe Taylor is preserved 
for us in a curious way, in a piece of a letter which 
has been torn across. It was written, on the 1st of 
April 1651, to Sir William Dugdale, the antiquary; 
what remains of it is of deep interest. Among other 
things, Taylor says, "I have but lately buried my 
dear wife." He also mentions, " I have some things 



88 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

now in [ ] preparing, The Rule of Holy Dying ; 

I have [ ]ow transcribing it." The book, of 

which the first draft is here mentioned, was completed 
and sent to the press in October of the same year, the 
dedication being signed on the anniversary of Lady 
Carbery's death. It was adorned with a folding plate 
by Peter Lombart, representing the hall of a country 
house, where a clergyman displays the life-sized picture 
of a skeleton to a handsome lady, with her husband 
and child. This group is supposed to contain portraits 
of Taylor himself and of the Carberys. In the dedica- 
tion addressed to the Earl, Taylor speaks with dignity 
of their common bereavement; "both your lordship 
and myself have lately seen and felt such sorrows of 
death, and such sad departure of dearest friends, that 
it is more than high time we should think ourselves 
nearly concerned." Death had come so near them 
both as to fetch away a portion from their very hearts, 
and a community of grief drew the survivors together 
in a solemn and pious bond. 

The praise, which it was not possible to give to 
the Holy Living without reserve, will be withheld by 
no competent critic from The Rules and Exercises of 
Holy Dying. The resemblance between these two 
treatises, which are often confounded, is a purely 
superficial one. Considered as literature, the superiority 
of the latter over the former is immense ; since that 
genius which is only fitfully and feebly apparent in 
the Holy Living, illuminates the Holy Dying in a 
limpid and continuous glory. Between the two 
volumes there is all the difference which there must 
be between a piece of task-work, honestly and com- 
petently performed, and a product of vehement inspira- 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 89 

tion. Jeremy Taylor had formed no project of a 
continuation of the Holy Living. On the contrary, 
that work had included meditations and prayers to 
be used at the approach of death. But now Taylor 
had himself passed through the crisis of watching the 
demise of a beloved and sentient being ; he had passed 
through this crisis twice in a few months. It was no 
longer a question of conventional piety, of what all 
Christians felt or should feel at this extraordinary 
juncture ; it was an observation of what his own 
heart had throbbed with in agony and terror and 
incurable regret. In the coldness of his own hearth- 
stone, in the like coldness at Golden Grove, he sat 
down and wrote one of the most beautiful prose 
compositions of the seventeenth century, a threnody 
palpitating with enthusiasm and emotion. 

Jeremy Taylor claimed that the Holy Dying was 
the earliest work of its kind "that I remember to 
have been published in the Church of England." He 
admits that there had been many in the Church of 
Rome, but he holds the resemblance of his treatise 
with these to be quite superficial. He claims an 
originality; "in this affair I was forced almost to 
walk alone"; the only help he has had having come 
from the fountains of Scripture and from "some 
experience in the cure of souls." This, then, is the 
first point which it may be useful to consider in 
dealing with the causes of the vitality of the Holy 
Dying as a work of art. Its brilliant freshness is 
owing, in the outset, to the fact that the author is 
not, like so many theologians of his time, chewing 
the cud of the old accepted platitudes and holy saws, 
but is feeding the arteries of his imagination with 



90 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

a constant flow of recent personal observation. These 
are clinical notes, sharply perceived in protracted 
hours of acute mental activity ; and they are used to 
produce a sort of pathology of the soul in physical 
pain. He has evidently been deeply impressed by the 
experiences of these dear persons in their hour of agony, 
by their "unequal courages and accidental fortitude." 
Being brought face to face, in this way, with all the 
violence of death, he is at once fascinated and exalted 
by it. He fears a kind of hysterical reaction from 
what he has endured and seen, and he determines to 
use his emotion for a purpose at once creative and 
sedative, because " nothing is more unreasonable than 
to entangle our spirits in wildness and amazement, 
like a partridge in a net, which she breaks not, though 
she breaks her wings." 

Few points are more interesting than the modern- 
ness of Taylor's attitude to many themes which were 
still in his time subjected to the traditions of the 
Renaissance. The conception of death which pre- 
vailed in the poetry, the sermons, and the philosophy 
of the early part of the seventeenth century was a 
survival of the "Danses Macabres " of the fifteenth and 
sixteenth. Death was still generally regarded anthropo- 
morphically and positively, as a great pale tyrant, an 
executioner, a headsman concealed behind a curtain. 
He was " the unsparing pursuivant with eagles' wings " ; 
he was even the grisly, cynical humorist, waiting to 
pounce on the king as he ascends his throne, or to 
strike down the beggar as he reels out of the tavern. 
In literature, this sentiment of death as the skeleton 
that hides to take his victim unawares, because, if met 
in front, he might be parleyed with and even tricked, 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 91 

had produced some magnificent apologies and out- 
bursts. It had lent a wing to the heavy, historic muse 
of Ealegh ; it had spread its velvet over the sermons 
of Donne ; it had inspired a choir of doleful lyrists. 
But it was cast out of court, and relegated to a place 
among things childish and outworn, by the Holy Dying 
of Jeremy Taylor, and never again could this con- 
ception of death, as a gymnastic skeleton with a dart 
springing from the tomb, be put forward without 
danger of awakening a smile of disgust. 

To the elegists of a decayed Renaissance, death 
had seemed a sort of central actor in a tragedy. To 
Taylor, as to a physician of to-day, it is not a figure 
at all, but a negation ; a state in which the powers of 
movement and assimilation have ceased their activity, a 
point where the equilibrium in which life has consisted 
has broken down, and where what is left is nothing. 
Taylor's originality consists in the firmness with which 
he turns away from the conception of a grinning shape 
behind the arras, ready to strike, and concentrates his 
attention on the psychology of the still living, but 
rapidly declining and obscured humanity. Accordingly 
he does not, in the manner of his predecessors, expatiate 
on the majesty of death, or cultivate the pretension 
and splendour of high family funerals. In particular, 
he has little or nothing to say about the subject which 
had so deeply stirred the imagination of the previous 
age, the conduct of obsequies. That does not in- 
terest him in the least. There is no dwelling upon 
the deaths of great persons, a matter in which the 
early seventeenth century had been so disagreeably 
insistent. Jeremy Taylor finds the death of "a poor 
shepherd or a maid-servant" quite as interesting as 



92 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

that of a prince or a countess. And in an age so 
copious and tumultuous in its funerals, lie is severe 
in denouncing anything like ambitious or pompous 
sorrow, and in deprecating all ostentatious lamentation 
for the dead. 

Another very interesting example of the modernity 
of Taylor's mind, and his freedom from the trammels 
of his time, is to be observed in the curious notes on 
the approach and development of illness, and on the 
behaviour of those who surround the sick, in the 
later part of the Holy Dying. He seems to have 
divined, by sheer exercise of the imagination, some 
of the great truths of modern medicine, so far at least 
as to reject, or question, that universal idea of disease 
as the work of a malignant spirit outside the body, of 
which Sir Frederick Treves has lately spoken in his 
interesting strictures on a great physician younger 
than Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich. Jeremy 
Taylor, in his closely observed notes on the psychology 
of persons attacked by sickness, seems to rise above 
the preternatural view, and to accept, with clairvoy- 
ance, the simple natural theory of the processes of 
dissolution. He even seems to have foreseen some- 
thing of that very theory of the beneficence of some 
of the symptoms of disease which is claimed as a 
discovery almost of our own day. He points out the 
benefit of some illnesses in giving the nerves an 
opportunity of rest; sickness becoming "the more 
tolerable because it cures very many evils, and takes 
away the sense of all the cross fortunes which amaze 
the spirits of some men, and transport them beyond 
the limits of all patience." And he actually perceives 
that some acute forms of illness may be, as our great 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 93 

modern surgeon puts it, "the outcome of nature's 
vigorous effort to minimise the calamity," and force 
the patient to a recumbent posture, where, says the 
divine, "all losses and disgraces, domestic cares and 
public evils, ... lie down and rest upon the sick 
man's pillow." 

In the more enthusiastic parts of the Holy Dying, the 
sustained brightness and abundance of the style are 
extraordinary. The images bud and branch under our 
eyes in a miraculous profusion. To this work Jeremy 
Taylor brought a mind steeped in the loftiest poetry 
of antiquity ; nowhere are the references so frequent 
as they are here to Lucretius, Horace, and Lucan, 
to Persius, Ovid, and Petronius Arbiter. Almost the 
only modern books which he quotes are the then very 
popular Odes of the Polish poet, Casimir, who had lately 
died, and the Funeral Monuments of John Weever, the 
antiquary. But although the ancients colour so much 
of the tissue of his style, he has now almost entirely 
abandoned the vexatious habit of quoting them in bulk. 
He has learned at last the very useful lesson which 
English prose had been so slow to learn, but which 
Joachim du Bellay had successfully taught the French 
authors a hundred years before — namely, that good 
masons do not build their new buildings partly of fresh 
brick, and partly of stones torn out of stately ancient 
houses, but leave what other men have built, and try 
to construct as beautifully as they did, in reverent 
imitation, but with a different material. An example, 
taken at random from the Holy Dying, may serve to 
exemplify Taylor's method. Here a tag from the 
Hijypolytus of the pseudo-Seneca serves as the grain 
of sand around which the nacreous ingenuity of 



94 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

the English writer secretes its layers of mother-of- 
pearl : — 

" Since we stay not here, being people but of a day's abode, 
and our age is like that of a fly and contemporary with a 
gourd, we must look somewhere else for an abiding city, a 
place in another country to fix our house in, whose walls and 
foundation is God, where we must find rest, or else be restless 
for ever. For whatever ease we can have or fancy here is 
shortly to be changed into sadness or tediousness. It goes 
away too soon, like the periods of our life ; or stays too long, 
like the sorrows of a sinner. Its own weariness, or a contrary 
disturbance, is its load, or it is eased by its revolution into 
vanity and forgetfulness. And where either there is sorrow 
or an end of joy there can be no true felicity, which must be 
had by some instrument and in some period of our duration. 
We must carry up our affections to the mansions prepared for 
us above, where eternity is the measure, felicity is the state, 
angels are the company, the Lamb is the light, and God is the 
portion and inheritance." 

Of all the writings of Jeremy Taylor, the Holy Dying 
achieved the most direct and durable popularity. 
Twenty authorised editions of it appeared before the 
close of the seventeenth century. It produced an 
instant effect in humanising the piety of English 
readers, which controversy had bitterly exacerbated. 
Taylor's attitude, his philosophy of action, was holy, 
but it was neither morose, fanatical, nor uncharitable. 
It was inspired by a gentle' sobriety, a brooding 
tenderness and pity. On some points it displayed an 
extraordinary liberality, and in its melancholy it was 
marvellously wholesome. The curious morbidity of 
the age found no support in Taylor's healthy sweetness. 
The dying are to be led to examine their conscience, 
but not in gloom ; the scrutiny is not to be distracted 
by the terrors of law and punishment. All this was 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 95 

eminently serviceable to the irritated nerves of his 
contemporaries ; it was a balm to their spiritual wounds. 

We may hope that the success of this and other of 
his literary writings was of practical benefit to Taylor's 
fortunes, which were at a low ebb in 1651. In that 
year he was embarrassed by a cessation of the patron- 
age of Lord Hatton. " I am troubled," he says, " that 
he will not honour me with a letter. " He was doubt- 
less unaware of the penury into which Lord Hatton 
had now sunk in Paris. He makes a very strong 
appeal to Lord Carbery's generosity in the dedication 
to the Holy Living, which book he compares, with more 
quaintness than propriety, to the gift of "apiece of 
gum or the fat of a cheap lamb." In the same work 
he seems to describe himself as " a little bee that feeds 
on dew or manna, and lives upon what falls every 
morning from the storehouses of heaven, clouds and 
providence." In the Holy Vying he is still more 
explicit, and speaks of the joy with which he ministers 
to the sick and penitent, " having scarce any other 
possibilities left me of doing alms, or exercising that 
charity by which we shall all be judged at doomsday." 
His salary as chaplain at Golden Grove must have 
been small, and perhaps irregularly paid. 

It was possibly the opportunity to sell yet another 
manuscript to a London bookseller which led to the pub- 
lication, in this same year, of a folio pamphlet entitled 
Clerus Domini. This is one of the rarest and most 
obscure of Taylor's writings, though copies of it are 
sometimes found bound up with the Eniautos. It was 
a relic of his old Oxford days, and had been written, some 
eight or nine years previously, at the special command 
of "our late king." So much had happened, so much 



96 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

had been overturned and ruined in the English Church 
since its composition, that it must have seemed obsolete 
to readers of 1651. It was issued without dedication 
or prefatory matter of any kind, perhaps surreptitiously. 
It is concerned with arguments for the ministerial order 
as an absolute religious necessity. The author asserts 
that the strictness and severity of the hierarchy are 
pleasing to God, and have descended to us directly 
from that primal Consecrator, the Holy Ghost. There 
must be experts in religion, as in art and science, men 
of careful training, supernaturally selected, by whose 
delicate and skilful care alone piety can escape being 
" bruised by the hard hand of mechanics." 

The treatise is very outspoken, and must have been 
excessively distasteful to the Parliamentarian divines, 
if any of them came across it. It treats their preten- 
sions with the utmost contempt. They are all pre- 
sumptuous amateurs, who pretend to work a machine 
of the nature of which they are profoundly ignorant. 
Four great mysteries are defined as lying within the 
exclusive province of the consecrated minister : these 
are remission of sins, the preaching of the Gospel, 
baptism, and the distribution of the Sacrament. The 
minister is lifted above common humanity by his 
apostolical prerogative. He is ordained that he may 
bridge over the mysterious and wonderful chasm 
between God and man; this none but "a settled 
ministry" can do. The self-chosen presbyter or 
preacher has no apparatus for crossing the abyss, and 
his offers of ministration are as absurd as they are 
profane. This is the temper of Jeremy Taylor before 
his afflictions had mellowed him, and the chief interest 
of Clerus Domini is the evidence which it gives U s of 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 97 

the advance of every species of liberality which he had 
made during his years of seclusion in Wales. It is 
quite possible that he had nothing to do with its 
publication in 1651, but that Eoyston acquired it from 
some one at Oxford in whose hands it had remained 
ever since Taylor's flight in 1644. 

From a literary point of view Clerus Domini is 
almost valueless, except, to the reader who approaches 
his works in the order of their publication, as a 
startling instance of the development of Taylor's 
intellect and style since he came to Golden Grove. 
Here we have the tedious, constant quotation from 
the fathers in Latin and Greek, the equally tedious, 
casuistical building-up of a structure which seems like 
argument and is not, the clumsy sentences without 
felicity or music. Indeed, it would hardly be worth 
while to mention Clerus Domini, if it were not so 
useful a text upon which to discourse on the wonder- 
ful advance in all the powers of its author which 
followed his flight to Wales. The contrast may be 
still further emphasised by comparison of it with two 
compositions which appeared in the same year (1651), 
in a little book called Choice Forms of Prayer. This 
was the venture of a publisher who collected from 
a large number of popular divines the devotions which 
they were in the habit of using before and after 
preaching a sermon. Jeremy Taylor's contributions, 
particularly the first, are models of purity and grace. 

For the next three years what we know of Taylor is 
almost exclusively confined to a record of his publica- 
tions. His life seems to have become more and more 
sequestered. Eust speaks of his "solitude" and of 
his "retirement" at this time, and of his implicit 
G 



98 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

devotion to the composition of ''those excellent dis- 
courses, which are enough of themselves to furnish a 
library." During these years the only friend of whose 
presence we are allowed to be conscious is Lord 
Carbery, who seems to have preserved an even tenor 
of protective sympathy. But Tajdor was now in cor- 
respondence with theologians in various parts of the 
kingdom. In a letter to Gilbert Sheldon, his old friend, 
the former warden of All Souls College, Oxford, dated 
April 11, 1653, he speaks of obtaining for a certain 
manuscript treatise of his as much criticism from the 
neighbouring Welsh clergy as he could ; and of a con- 
ference he has lately had " with a Jesuit in these parts." 
The work which 'he mentions thus to Sheldon is the 
Real Presence, of 1654, and he states that he has sent 
a copy in proof-sheets to Dr. Brian Duppa, the aged 
Bishop of Salisbury, who was now living a life of strict 
retirement at Richmond in Surrey ; this eminent divine 
was another of the old All Souls friends of happier 
times. We find Taylor thanking Sheldon, who has 
done him the very welcome favour of paying him what 
appear to be some partial arrears of his college stipend 
— Taylor "resolving to take up the remaining portion 
of the debt at the great Audit " — and sending him a 
new edition of The Great Exemplar and his new volume 
of Sermons. 

The last-mentioned book, which Taylor refers to in 
this letter to Sheldon as published before April 1653, 
is perhaps, from a purely literary point of view, the 
most important which he ever produced. It was issued 
as Tiuenty-Five Sermons preached at Golden Grove, being 
for the Winter Half -Year, and completes the series of 
which the first instalment appeared in 1651. Like its 

J* ■ 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 99 

« 
predecessor, it mainly consists of pairs of sermons, 
although in many cases there are groups of three, and 
there is one of four ; but the entire Eniautos does not 
contain a single address which is complete in itself. 
It follows, therefore, that no effort is made to provide 
appropriate teaching for particular feast days, and, in 
fact, with the exceptions of Whitsuntide and Advent, 
no special or topical allusiveness is attempted. What 
has been already said in general about the sermons of 
T eremy Taylor is true of this, his most magnificent 
collection of them. The dedication, once more to Lord 
Carbery, is a brilliant essay on the value of sermons. 
The author observes that "all the great necessities of 
the Church have been served by the zeal of preaching 
in public," which " restored the splendour of the Church, 
when barbarism and wars and ignorance, either sate in, 
or broke the doctor's chair in pieces." It is therefore 
peculiarly proper that in this dreadful age of heresy 
and schism, God's ministers should proclaim "those 
truths which are the enamel and beauty of our 
churches." There is no trace in this dedication of the 
reluctance and regret which marked that of 1651. In 
1653 Taylor has no more diffidence. He knows now 
that he had a great and fruitful work to perform from 
the pulpit. This is an interesting psychological point 
which has not hitherto been observed by the succes- 
sive editors who have reversed the order of the two 
sections of the Eniautos. 

Again, in the body of the sermons, we are conscious, 
if we read them as they were written, of an important 
advance in the genius of the author. The Twenty-Five 
have all the lucidity and harmony of the Twenty-Eight, 
but they have in addition a certain sublimity of tone 

LrfC. 



100 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

which is unknown to the works which Taylor com- 
posed before the deaths of Lady Carbery and of his 
wife. In some of these homilies he touches the very 
highest level of human oratory. He proposes no new 
theology, he discusses no spinosities of creed ; he maps 
the path of conduct, and enlightens it with all the 
colour and radiance of his luminous experience. In 
each sermon there comes the direct appeal to the 
imagination of his auditors. The skill with which 
he presents picture after picture to the eyes of the 
listeners is wonderful. Let us take, for example, the 
first sermon on "Christ's Advent." Here we are 
hurried from vivid scene to scene ; in rapid succession 
we watch the passage of the plague-cart through a 
doomed city ; we have a Michelangelesque present- 
ment of the terrors of the Day of Judgment ; we 
watch a party of youths and girls carousing at the 
wine-cup • we listen to a Greek philosopher addressing 
his disciples in an enclosure ; we have the pathetic 
drama of a young gentleman breaking from his ungodly 
mother, with her repentance, and his backsliding, and 
her ultimate reproaches ; we are the spectators at a sun- 
rise, and then at an earthquake on the shores of the 
Mediterranean, and then at an apocalyptic scene when 

"the birds shall mourn and change their songs to threnes 
and sad accents. Rivers of fires shall rise from the east and 
the west, and the stars shall be rent into threads of light, and 
scatter like the beards of comets." 

Nor does all this exhaust the variety of the preacher's 
images, while this wealth of illustration and allusion 
never interferes for a moment with the clear flow of 
the orator's solemn, evangelical argument. 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 101 

In dealing with the mysteries of religion, it is 
interesting to see how completely Taylor continues 
master of his voice. We see him in a sort of ecstasy ; 
his fancy, with outspread wings, soars up into the 
empyrean, yet he retains it wholly under his control. 
Nowhere, in the series of his writings, does he deal 
with themes in which the enthusiastic cry of the 
preacher is so apt to break in a kind of hysterical 
falsetto as he does in the Twenty-Five Sermons. Yet 
he remains always master of his art. In his three 
great addresses on "Doomsday-Book" his reticence 
is extraordinary. Here, where the temptation to 
expatiate on horror is so great, Taylor is careful to 
dwell more on the recompenses than on the punish- 
ments. He shrinks from all those material catalogues 
of terrific experience in which the Mediaeval theo- 
logians delighted. He is loath to admit the doctrine 
of eternal torment, but leans to the kindlier hope 
that the wicked soul is broken up and destroyed, 
although he warns all those who still lie "in the 
neighbourhood and fringes of the flames of hell " not 
to trust to this. 

In the different numbers of these sermons Jeremy 
Taylor sounds the whole diapason of majestic elo- 
quence. Nor does he neglect the craving of the ear 
for quieter periods and a more broken cadence. The 
group of sermons on " The Return of Prayers " offers 
us instances, as many as we can desire, of both forms 
of beauty. Here is a fragment in the more ornate 
manner : — 

" Our prayers upbraid our spirits when we beg coldly and 
tamely for those things for which we ought to die, which are 
more precious than the globes of kings and weightier than 



102 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

imperial sceptres, richer than the spoils of the sea, or the 
treasures of the Indian hills." 

And here is a passage in which the short, nervous 
sentences are like those of our latest masters of 
colloquial English : — 

" Holy prayer procures the ministry and service of angels. 
It rescinds the decrees of God. It cures sicknesses and obtains 
pardon. It arrests the sun in its course, and stays the wheels 
of the chariot of the moon. It rules over all God's creatures, 
and ojDens and shuts the storehouses of rain. It unlocks the 
cabinet of the womb, and quenches the violence of fire. It 
stops the mouths of lions, and reconciles our sufferance and 
weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of 
persecution. It pleases God and supplies all our needs. But 
prayer, that can do this much for us, can do nothing at all 
without holiness, for God heareth not sinners, but if any man 
be a worshipper of God, and doth His will, him He heareth." 

There was no one else in England in 1653, there 
was no one to arise for a long time after that date, 
who could write sustained prose with this simplicity 
and force and delicate precision. 

From this volume, in which the variety and fulness 
of Taylor's imagination are seen in their highest 
development, it is difficult to part ourselves. The 
whole Eniautos might take as its motto a phrase which 
occurs in one of its most beautiful sections, "The 
Marriage Ring " : — 

" These are the little lines of a man's duty, which, like 
threads of light from the body of the sun, do clearly describe 
all the regions of his proper obligations." 

The simplicity and gravity, the light and swiftness 
of Taylor's exhortations are all summed up in this 
paragraph, which includes even, if we look deep 



hi.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 103 

enough, their humanity and their humanism. This last 
deserves special notice. We can even trace with what 
books the preacher had been refreshing his memory. 
When he wrote "Apples of Sodom" his mind was 
steeped in the Hecuba of Euripides; "The Marriage 
Ring" testifies to his deep enjoyment of the Greek 
Anthology; when he sat down to meditate on "Christian 
Simplicity," he had just been reading the third book 
of Cicero's Offices. In this he is the greatest, as he was 
the last, of the seventeenth century theologians who 
took the picturesque parts of the classics as their store- 
house of allusion ; in him a phase of the pure Renais- 
sance reaches its highest point. No one before him 
had filled his pages with half so many images of 
plastic beauty : in this he is in our prose what Spenser 
had been in our poetry. And after him was to follow, 
almost immediately, a generation blind alike to natural 
phenomena and to the corporeal loveliness embodied in 
ancient literature. 

One curious omission will be noted in the sermons, 
as in the other writings of Jeremy Taylor. The 
absence of almost all allusion to the life of the poor 
is very curious. Such references as we may discover 
are perfunctory and vague. The teaching of Taylor 
is in the main aristocratic; it is delivered from a 
seraphic height, and addressed to all classes of men, 
but particularly to those who are influential and well- 
to-do. No temptation, no frailty of the rich is allowed 
to pass unindicated or unreproved. The preacher is 
speaking in the private chapel of a great house, and 
mainly to those who are responsible from their wealth, 
their intellect, or their influence. Outside are the 
hordes of the wild Welsh, but of them the preacher 



104 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 



never speaks and never seems to think. The select 
folk who came to Golden Grove to listen to him ate 
sumptuously every day; their danger was to forget 
God in their pleasures and in their indolence , and the 
preacher reproves them, seeks to awaken their con- 
sciences, draws them back to duty by such exquisite 
arts and appeals as would come most directly home to 
their refinement. This involves, to be just, no harsh 
judgment upon Jeremy Taylor, even in this one 
particular, for he did exactly what it was his duty 
to do. Yet we cannot help wishing that the demo- 
cratic element in society had also had an opportunity 
to attract him. It did not, and it was really not at 
Golden Grove, but ten years later in the court of 
Louis XIV., that this essentially modern note was to 
be sounded. It was Bossuet, and not Taylor, who 
was to introduce the definite consideration of the cause 
of the poor, and to bid the Christian world listen to 
the "cri de misere a l'entour de nous, qui devrait nous 
fondre le cceur." 

For ten years the current of Jeremy Taylor's life 
had now been absolutely unbroken, except by the 
hand of death. He had lived, almost as retired as 
Moses in his cloud, in a sequestered valley of South 
Wales, which was full of the sound of waters, and un- 
disturbed by human voices. By a dispensation which 
might easily have seemed miraculous, through the 
cruellest time of distraction and peril, this exquisite 
talent had been preserved intact, hidden as if in the 
hollow of a mighty hand, granted every favourable 
opportunity for growing to its full stature. Nothing 
had been omitted which could enhance the advantages 
of this hermitage, where there was poverty and yet 



in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 105 

no want, leisure enough, and yet some healthful busi- 
ness, no crowd to distract and press, but a little circle 
of auditors, sympathetic, earnest and appreciative. In 
this beautiful woodland, with a roll of the winding 
Towey bent round him like an arm, Jeremy Taylor 
had grown to be the greatest prose writer in England. 
He had no rival among those who understood and 
knew. It might well be that he was sometimes 
content to drop further struggle, and to look forward 
with satisfaction to a quiet burial in the churchyard of 
Llanfihangel. Like the prophet in Alfred de Vigny's 
poem, he might cry • — 

" Seigneur, j'ai vecu puissant et solitaire, 
Laissez-moi m'endormir du somnieil de la terre." 

But this was not to be. A variety of circum- 
stances, without immediately severing his connection 
with Golden Grove, was now to draw him out into the 
light of common day, and cause him to take part in 
the anxieties and afflictions of his fellow-men. 



CHAPTER IV 

YEARS OF AFFLICTION 

(1654-1658) 

Jeremy Taylor had enjoyed complete immunity at 
Golden Grove. No one had disturbed the growth of 
his soul. His genius had spread its branches and 
flowered like a magnolia under the shadow of a 
southern wall in a quiet courtyard. In that period of 
the cruel discomfiture of his friends, he alone was 
protected by his powerlessness, by the modesty of his 
fortunes. As he said himself, "No man goes about 
to poison a poor man's pitcher, nor lays plots to forage 
his little garden, made for the hospital of two bee-hives, 
and the feasting of a few Pythagorean herb-eaters." 
But when the poor man leaves his rosemary and his 
rue, and wanders forth into the market-place, he finds 
himself jostled by the throng, and may be can never 
recover his hermitage. This is precisely what happened 
to our divine, whom circumstances, or his own im- 
patience, now tempted forth into the world, at first 
only on short visits, and then altogether, with the 
result that, lover of contemplation as he was, he never 
again knew what perfect security and perfect rest 
meant. 

It is probable that for some time past he had been 

106 



chap, iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 107 

in the habit of coming up to town whenever he was 
about to publish a book. He seems to have been in 
frequent personal contact with Royston, his publisher, 
who is much less likely to have travelled down into 
Carmarthenshire to see his client than to have offered 
him hospitality in London. From 1654 onwards this 
ceases to be a matter of conjecture; we find Jeremy 
Taylor frequently going up to town, and light is 
thrown upon his movements by his forming a new 
and most valuable friendship, namely with John Evelyn. 
This gentleman was one of the most entertaining and 
intelligent persons of that age; endowed with extra- 
ordinary activity both of mind and body, a "philo- 
sopher," as men of science were then called, who was 
doing as much as any one in Europe to encourage 
research and prepare for the reception of new truth. 
He was scarcely less actively interested in the fine 
arts and in literature, and he wrote exceedingly well 
in English. Evelyn was one of those beings who 
dazzle their own generation, and puzzle ours to account 
for the fact that they were not absolutely first-rate. 
It seems as though nothing but a little more intensity 
in any one particular direction was needed to turn 
Evelyn from a paragon of all the talents into an 
undisputed genius. 

This delightful man was in his thirty-fourth year 
when Taylor became acquainted with him. Evelyn 
had been a gentleman-commoner of Balliol when 
Taylor preached his university sermon, but we do not 
know that they had met. He had left England when 
the Civil War broke out, and he had lived for several 
years in Italy, making a very close study of the 
antiquities and of modern Italian painting, architec- 



108 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

ture, and sculpture. He had certainly grown to be 
the leading English connoisseur of his time. Then he 
had slowly returned northwards, and having married 
an English heiress in Paris, he had determined to 
venture upon returning to this country, in order to 
take up an estate which devolved upon his wife. But 
he was unsettled, until, at the opening of 1653, he 
obtained possession of the Browne property called 
Sayes Court, near Deptford, in Kent, which had 
belonged to his wife's family. He was tired of 
wandering about the world ; he wanted to give 
literary form to the innumerable scientific and anti- 
quarian notes he had taken, and he began at once, 
with feverish eagerness, to lay out the grounds and 
furnish the apartments of Sayes Court, that it might 
become his retreat. 

Evelyn, who at the end of his crowded life was able 
truthfully to say that his experience was "all is vanity 
which is not honest, and there is no solid wisdom but 
in piety," was a devoted Anglican, and was very 
desirous of attaching to his household some sequestrated 
minister of the national church. It was necessary to 
act -with caution, for any public patronage of clergy- 
men was suspiciously regarded. His choice originally 
fell on a worthy divine of Eltham, Eichard Owen, who 
seems to have acted for a time as private chaplain at 
Sayes Court. The active and illuminated mind of 
Evelyn, however, with its buoyant ambition, could 
hardly receive full satisfaction from the discourses of 
a humdrum country practitioner. At this time Crom- 
well tacitly permitted a single pulpit in London, that 
of St. Gregory's, a little church which stood close to 
St. Paul's, to be filled by a succession of Anglican 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 109 

clergy. He doubtless considered that this was a 
salutary relief for an eloquence which, if pent up too 
rigorously, might cause a dangerous explosion. On 
the 15th of March 1654 Evelyn "went to London to 
hear the famous Dr. Jeremy Taylor at St. Gregory's, 
concerning evangelical perfection." This was perhaps 
Evelyn's earliest approach to one who was to take a 
place among the dearest of his friends. 

One of those churchmen with whom Jeremy Taylor 
was now in frequent correspondence was John Warner, 
Bishop of Rochester, to whom he dedicated the treatise 
on Transubstantiation, called The Real Presence of Christ 
in the Blessed Sacrament, which was his solitary publica- 
tion in 1654. Warner, who was now in his seventieth 
year, had been one of the most inflexible supporters 
of Charles I.; in him, as Fuller said, "dying Episcopacy 
gave the last groan in the House of Lords." He was 
a most generous benefactor, out of his private purse, 
to the distressed and ejected clergy ; for several years 
he had been wandering about Wales, doing what kind- 
ness he could, and had come into personal contact with 
Jeremy Taylor, who speaks of the "favours" with 
which Warner has "already endeared his thankfulness 
and service," and of the Bishop's having "assisted his 
condition" out of "the remains" of his "lessened 
fortunes." The activity and munificence of the ejected 
Bishop of Rochester were constant thorns in the side 
of the Parliamentarians, who sequestrated nine-tenths 
of his large personal estate, and would have imprisoned 
the indomitable old man if they could only have 
caught him. Considering that Warner was in the 
most careful retirement in 1654, it was perhaps more 
zealous than tactful of Taylor to dedicate a treatise to 



110 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

him by name, although there is nothing in The Real 
Presence fitted to exasperate the political authorities. 

In this work Taylor returns to the fight with an 
old enemy, whom he had long neglected, Rome. He 
says that the supposed destruction of the Church of 
England has filled the Romanists with a "strange 
triumphal gaiety." In particular, he speaks with 
bitter indignation of one who was formerly the son 
of the Church of England, " but who ran away from 
her sorrow, and disinherited himself because she was 
not able to give him a temporal portion." The utter- 
ances of this man, whom Taylor refuses to name, have 
principally stirred him up to write this book; it is 
believed that he refers to Bishop Morton's former 
secretary, John Sarjeaunt, who threw up his post at 
the beginning of the Civil War, and lived as a priest 
in a college of seculars at Lisbon until 1652, when 
he came back to England as a Roman propagandist. 
Taylor had perhaps had a visit at Golden Grove from 
Sarjeaunt, for he says that he "has been by chance 
engaged in a conference with a person of another 
persuasion," whom in a letter to Sheldon he calls a 
Jesuit, "the man not unlearned nor unwary." 

In The Real Presence we are made to feel that Taylor, 
as a pure man of letters, is slipping away from us. 
This is a piece of composition seriously inferior to any- 
thing else that he had written since he arrived in 
Wales. It is apparently thrown off in great haste, 
and Taylor was never at his best when he improvised. 
It is written to impress those who will be quite 
indifferent to the charm of his language and the 
luxuriance of his imagery, and on whom, therefore, 
he is careful to waste neither of these deliberate 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 111 

ornaments. On the other hand, here, if ever, what 
was called, in theological circles, "learning," would be 
effective, if nowhere else, and Taylor is redundant, 
from Porphyry and Justin Martyr, in sentences of 
monstrous prolixity. The arguments of The Real 
Presence were contested, even by those whom they 
were intended to support, and the author was charged, 
as of old by Chillingworth in Oxford, with not listen- 
ing to what his opponents said, and with indulging 
in illogical rhetoric. The book contains some fine 
passages, and a few lively ones, but on the whole it is 
controversy and not literature. It may be noted in 
passing that Taylor shows himself well acquainted 
with his Catholic contemporaries in France, and quotes, 
among others, from the great Arnauld of Port-Royal, as 
again in later volumes. 

Evelyn had evidently introduced himself to Taylor 
soon after his sitting under him in St. Gregory's. But 
their intimacy seems to have sprung up in connection 
with a misfortune which happened to Taylor at the 
beginning of 1655. It appears that the divine had 
shown the preface of a new book, The Golden Grove, 
either in manuscript or proof, to Evelyn, who had 
highly commended its outspoken statement that " never 
did the excellency of Episcopal government appear so 
demonstratively and conspicuously as now." That was 
a hard saying for Parliament and the governing pres- 
byters, who were, moreover, determining upon a more 
vigorous suppression of Anglican preachers. 

In December 1654 the laxity of which the Anglican 
clergy had been slowly taking advantage was sharply 
reproved by Parliament. There appeared a general 
tendency to return to the old intolerant methods, and 



112 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

the whole question of permitting sectarian worship 
was discussed. When Jeremy Taylor went on to 
speak of Cromwell as "the son of Zippor," it is no 
wonder that Evelyn thought that he was daring the 
government to undo him. The Golden Grove was 
entered at Stationers' Hall on the 26th of January 
1655, and exactly a fortnight afterwards Evelyn, who 
had been away at Woodcot since New Year's Day, 
came home to Sayes Court, and found two letters, 
one informing him of Taylor's arrest and the other 
of his release. As Evelyn, in consideration of what 
The Golden Grove contained, had been very anxious 
about his friend's safety, and had been quite prepared 
to hear "sad news and deplore your restraint," it is 
evident that Taylor's imprisonment was very brief. 
Perhaps the proclamation of religious liberty, pro- 
mulgated on the 15th of February, was the immediate 
excuse for his release. We have no light at all upon 
the locality where he was confined, but it was probably 
the Tower of London; he would be required to pay 
a fine, and detained until his friends had produced 
the money. 

Deeply sympathising with Taylor's affliction, Evelyn 
hastened to strengthen their friendship, and on the 18th 
of March went to town on purpose to hear the great 
divine preach. Less than a fortnight later Evelyn 
had made up his mind to take a serious step, and on 
the 31st he "made a visit to Dr. Jeremy Taylor to 
confer with him about some spiritual matters, using 
him thenceforward as my ghostly father." Many 
years afterwards, looking back upon the past, Evelyn 
besought God Almighty to keep him thankful for the 
impulse which carried him to Taylor, and to make 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 113 

him always mindful of "his heavenly assistances." 
Taylor was manifestly now in danger, but preserved 
from it by the zeal and influence of Evelyn, to whom 
it was probably due that he was so slow in returning to 
his Welsh home. In the meantime the early months 
of 1655 present two works for our consideration. 

The picturesque title of The Golden Grove and its 
fiery preface of revolt from under "the harrows and 
saws of impertinent and ignorant preachers," are likely 
to awaken anticipations in the literary reader which 
the body of the treatise can only disappoint. It is a 
manual of daily prayers and litanies, so phrased as to 
contain a brief summary of all that a Christian should 
believe, practise, or desire. It begins with a Short 
Catechism, which Taylor hoped would be accepted by 
moderate churchmen as a temporary substitute for that 
which had been suppressed with the Liturgy. This is 
followed by an exposition of the Creed, and that by 
"Agenda," or a list of acts of piety to be performed 
throughout the day. The next section, "Via Pacis," 
is largely a paraphrase from the Imitation of Christ, and 
is followed by "Postulanda," a dilution — for we can 
call it nothing else — of the Lord's Prayer. Then follow, 
concluding the treatise, a set of devotions for the week ; 
many of these have the purity, and one or two some- 
thing of the magnificence, of their author, but they are 
in his least personal vein. On the whole The Golden 
Grove offers very little worthy the notice of the literary 
student of Taylor's works. 

But at the close of it, and appended to it as by an 

afterthought, is a slender collection of poems, Festival 

Hymns, which has the special interest attaching to the 

only work in verse which Jeremy Taylor published. 

H 



114 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

He himself indulged in no illusions about the merit of 
these exercises. A year later he looked back upon 
their publication with a blush, and when Evelyn had 
the complaisance to praise them, their author replied, 
"I could not but smile at my own weaknesses, and 
very much love the great candour and sweetness of 
your nature, that you were pleased to endure my 
English poetry. But I could not be removed from my 
certain knowledge of my own greatest weaknesses in 
it." Taylor was also, about this time, translating part 
of the De Re rum Natura into English verse, but desisted 
when he was shown by Evelyn the version of Lucretius 
which that philosopher had made. All this is curious 
as showing that Jeremy Taylor, about 1655, having 
risen to the height of his mastery of prose, was 
attempting to extend his sovereignty into the province 
of verse. Had he attempted this twenty years earlier, 
it is probable that he might have trained himself to be 
an accomplished poet of the artificial order ; but he made 
the experiment too late. 

The greater part of the Festival Hymns is a sort of 
cantata on the mysteries of religion, arranged in con- 
nected sections. A quarter of a century had passed 
since certain eccentricities of the least happily inspired 
pieces in Herbert's Temple had opened the door to mere 
oddity in the form of religious poetry. The example 
of Cowley — although his Pindarique Odes, those great 
dissolvers of the public taste, were as yet hardly known 
— may have had some influence on Taylor. But the 
one precedent author whom he had manifestly read, 
and whose fantastic innovations in metre he accepted 
with alacrity, was Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, the 
first part of whose Silex Scintillans had appeared in 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 115 

1650 while the second was dated 1655. It is impossible 
to connect Vaughan with Taylor in any historical way. 
But it should be remembered that the lord of Golden 
Grove was a distant kinsman of the Silurist, that Llan- 
dilo and Llansaintffraid were within riding distance 
of one another, and that in Mrs. Philips, "the Match- 
less Orinda," of whom we shall presently speak, Henry 
Vaughan and Jeremy Taylor had an enthusiastic com- 
mon friend. 

The versification in the Festival Hymns consists of 
short lines, arbitrarily broken up by rhymes, and 
arranged on no rhythmical principle. No system could 
be less tuneful, and in comparison with these hymns 
the worst odes of Cowley and even of Flatman are 
musical ; what is curious in so learned a writer, Taylor's 
rhymes are often scarcely assonances. It was certainly 
in the Silex Scintillans that Taylor found his model for 
his eccentricity of metre ; we may perhaps go further, 
and in Vaughan's irregular canticles called " The Jews " 
and " Jesus Weeping " detect the identical poems which 
Taylor read at the close of 1654 and straightway sat 
down to imitate. He was far too skilful a craftsman 
to fail to produce something ingenious, and the follow- 
ing passage may be quoted as presenting Jeremy Taylor 
at his best as a poet : — 

" What ravish' d heart, seraphic tongue or eyes, 
Clear as the morning's rise, 
Can speak, or think, or see 
That bright eternity ? 
There the King's great transparent throne 
Is of an entire jasper stone : 
There the eye 
Of the chrysolite, 
And a sky 



116 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Of diamonds, rubies, chrysoprase, 
And above all, Thy holy face, 
Makes an eternal clarity. 
When Thou Thy jewels up dost bind, that day 
Remember us, we pray." 

It would be difficult to find a more instructive text 
on which to expatiate upon the essential difference 
between poetry and prose. For here are all the ele- 
ments of imagination and of language which Taylor 
would have employed in building up one of his dazzling 
prose sentences, lifting it into our vision like some 
perfect marble campanile against the blue Italian sky. 
But this strophe is a mere mistake ; it has neither the 
plastic harmony of prose, nor the severer and more 
mechanical beauty of verse. It misses either perfec- 
tion, and is merely a brilliant instance of the failure 
of a great genius to express itself in an unfamiliar 
medium. 

On the 3rd of May 1655 Jeremy Taylor's unlucky 
volume, the Unum Kecessarium, the production of which, 
though he acted in the purest good faith, was to destroy 
his peace of mind and make him an army of enemies, 
was entered at Stationers' Hall. It was not published, 
however, until October, and we now enter a very 
troubled and painful period of Taylor's life, where the 
sequence of causes and events is extremely obscure. 
What seems to be certain is that, having corrected the 
proofs of his book, he left for Wales in May, and on 
the road was arrested and thrown into Chepstow Castle. 
What was the reason of this second imprisonment 1 
It has been attributed to the sentiments of the Unum 
Necessarium, but the tenor of that work offered no excuse 
for such persecution had it been known, and, as we now 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 117 

find, it was not yet published. If the divine had been 
arrested for unlawful preaching in London, it would 
not have been in Chepstow but in the Tower that we 
should have found him. And the harsh treatment 
which he received from old church friends, like Duppa 
and Warner, would have been peculiarly untimely and 
unkind. The correspondence with these people, and 
with others, during Taylor's captivity, offers no sort of 
suggestion that he was confined for conscience' sake. 
The present writer has unwillingly come to the con- 
clusion that Taylor was probably arrested at the suit 
of some Welsh creditor, and for a debt which he could 
not pay. 

Taylor's poverty at this period of his life was ex- 
treme. Bishop Heber thought that he was married by 
this time to Joanna Bridges, and through this second 
wife possessed "a competent estate." But a careful 
examination of the correspondence shows this to be a 
mistake. Taylor's letters of this time are pitiful in 
their confession of poverty, and for reasons which are 
not beyond conjecture neither Evelyn on the one hand 
nor Carbery on the other seemed to be willing to 
advance him money. The Unum Necessarium has a 
dedication to Lord Carbery, which is dragged in very 
awkwardly, because the book had already, and much 
more appropriately, been introduced by a letter to 
Duppa and Warner. Perhaps, as his distresses gathered 
about him, he rapidly wrote the dedication to Lord 
Carbery as an appeal to his generosity, and in that 
case he was disappointed, for Lord Carbery evidently 
did not respond. And now, quite abruptly, Lord 
Carbery's name disappears from the chronicle of Taylor's 
life. When he was released from Chepstow, it was not 



118 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

to Llanfihangel-Aberbythych that he proceeded, but 
to the house of Joanna Bridges, at Man-dinam. Nor, 
in spite of all that his biographers have said, is there 
any evidence that Taylor ever visited Golden Grove 
again. 

Jeremy Taylor had lived too long in the shelter of 
an irresponsible asylum to face the world, and such a 
rough world, with any discretion. Everything which 
he did, on the occasion of his venturing from his Welsh 
retreat, was lacking in ripeness of judgment. The year 
1655 is marked at every turn by the amiable and 
enthusiastic divine's defect of common sense. In the 
first place, it was most rash and unworldly to advertise 
his retreat publicly and needlessly by calling his 
catechism for the use of anti-Parliamentarian persons, 
with its reckless preface, The Golden Grove. It is reason- 
able to infer that when he was thrown into prison, 
on the first occasion, for the outspoken opposition of 
this work to the ruling of the House of Commons, 
Cromwell's attention was drawn to the title, and that 
Lord Carbery was sharply called to order for the in- 
discretions of his chaplain. Moreover, it had been 
announced that after November 1 it would be illegal 
for him to keep a chaplain in his house at all, on pain 
of banishment and sequestration. The position of the 
ejected clergy had therefore become one of great peril 
to their friends, though, as it proved, the practice of 
the law was less vindictive than its theory. But Lord 
Carbery was a timid man, and nothing we know of his 
character would lead us to suppose that he would 
hesitate for one moment in sacrificing his clerical friend 
to the safety of his estates. If this be the case, it 
accounts for the sudden cessation of all reference to 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 119 

Golden Grove, and for Taylor's unpleasant surprise 
when, poor already, he approached his home, to find 
himself deprived of the only means of support left to 
him. 

At such a moment, a man more worldly-wise would 
have acted with discretion, but Taylor had nothing of 
the serpent in his disposition. For some reason, which 
it is impossible to determine, Evelyn thought it proper, 
or wise, or perhaps really kind, to allow him to remain 
ir Chepstow Castle for the present, merely looking 
about to provide a means of living for him when once 
he was released. In this conjuncture, Taylor had no 
influential friends but the High Church associates of 
his old Oxford days, several of whom were wealthy, 
and all had been well-disposed to him. But precisely 
in May 1655, as we shall now find, he had contrived 
to offend every one of them. 

In March, soon after his original release, Taylor had 
had an interview with the Bishop of Salisbury, Brian 
Duppa, who was up in London on one of his rare 
visits. Two or three years earlier Taylor had con- 
sulted Duppa, the one living churchman whose opinion 
he always seems most eager to conciliate, about "the 
body of cases of conscience " which he had so long had 
on his mind, and which eventually, after a thousand 
vicissitudes, saw the light as that most elephantine of 
all theological works, the Ductor Dubitantium. In the 
preparation of this book Jeremy Taylor displayed 
an extraordinary firmness, which it is perhaps not 
derogatory to his virtue to call an amazing obstinacy. 
Nobody welcomed the Ductor Dubitantium. The pub- 
lisher, eager to receive whatever else came from 
Taylor's pen, rejected or postponed it time after time. 



120 JEREMY TAYLOR [ceap. 

Duppa, indeed, not only "assented " to the scheme of it, 
when it was first laid before him, but " desired Taylor 
to proceed seriously and soberly with it," and promised 
"to pray for a blessing on the undertaking." But 
when Duppa said that, he had not seen the work. 

Driven inexorably by his conscience, and caring 
nothing for what the temporal results might be, 
Taylor pushed forward the vast scher •, but the more 
his friends saw of it the less they liked it. Mean- 
while, Taylor became aware that it was "necessary by 
way of introduction [to a monograph on the conscience] 
to premit in a more general way the doctrine and 
practice of repentance." He laid this scheme also 
before Duppa, and the Bishop of Salisbury, though 
obviously a little anxious, gave a prudent sanction 
to this, although he suspected that on the subject of 
a late repentance Jeremy Taylor held unusual views. 
But while Duppa warned him, "with a fatherly con- 
fidence," that in the very difficult matter he had 
undertaken he would "need a prudence more than 
ordinary," the Bishop did not so much as dream that 
Taylor would leap into a still more terrible thorn- 
bush, and advance what seemed to be positive heresy 
on the dogma of original sin. In the face of all this, 
it was indeed a saintly simplicity which led Taylor 
to inscribe the book on repentance, which neither 
prelate had seen, to Brian Duppa, as Bishop of Salis- 
bury, and to John Warner, as Bishop of Rochester. 
Meanwhile, Chepstow Castle opened its jaws and 
swallowed up the hapless Taylor. 

But Eoyston, who had secured the manuscript, 
alarmed by the catastrophe, stopped the printing for 
some months, and it was not until August that he 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 121 

bethought him of sending to Duppa a portion of the 
book. He forwarded a bundle of proofs, without 
beginning or end, and without any indication whether 
it was by Taylor's wish or not that he sent them. 
Duppa read what was consigned to him, first with 
bewilderment, then with horror, then with angry 
indignation. Here was a book, the publication of 
which Duppa had no power to stop, which might 
be supposed to have received the approbation of the 
Bishop of Eochester and himself, a book which 
attacked, in his judgment and Warner's, that "in- 
tegrity," that is to say that orthodoxy, which was 
dearer to them both than their own lives. And here 
was the author of that book absolutely unapproach- 
able, in prison; while the least publicity would only 
increase the scandal which the sequestrated bishops 
feared so much. 

At all events, if Jeremy Taylor could not be ap- 
proached, he could be written to. Duppa, though the 
mildest and kindest of men, was roused to vehement 
anger. He wrote to the imprisoned Taylor, and told 
him in the sharpest terms " what a scandal it would 
bring upon his poor desolate mother, the Church, 
which is likely to receive a greater wound by this 
unwary blow of his than by all the unreasonable acts 
of persecution which her malicious enemies have done 
against her." Duppa wrote a great deal more of this 
kind, and even "could not forbear to write sharper 
things than these." Jeremy Taylor replied, gently 
and regretfully, but "it seems," as Duppa complained 
to his friends, "that nothing could work upon him." 
Taylor wrote to defend his views, not to excuse them. 
When Duppa wrote again, Taylor did not answer. 



122 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

The bishops comforted themselves that perhaps the 
book would never appear, and that if it did, no one 
would know that they had seemed to encourage it in 
its inception. Meanwhile, Royston, having plucked 
up heart, proceeded with the printing, and in October 
the Unum Necessarium was published in London. What 
was the horror of Duppa and Warner to find, when 
they turned to it, that the terrible and embarrassing 
volume was dedicated to them both. All our love for 
Jeremy Taylor cannot prevent our sympathising with 
the Bishop of Salisbury in his scream of indignation. 
" Without any way of acquainting me with it, he has 
been pjeased to make use of my name in the very 
forehead of it ! " 

It was part of Taylor's unworldly simplicity that he 
could not be made to see that he ought not to have 
done this. He had written a very severe treatise on 
a difficult theological point, which he desired to bring 
strenuously under the notice of the Bishops of Salis- 
bury and Rochester. He did not for a moment realise 
that by dedicating the work to them he pledged them 
to a support of his views. In his lack of business 
experience, he did not perceive the extremely delicate 
position in which he was placing the ex-prelates, nor 
the injury he was doing them in identifying them 
with doctrines which were detestable to them. Warner 
seems to have taken the matter philosophically, but 
Duppa was excessively agitated, and actually sent round 
privately, among his friends, a sort of circular denoun- 
cing Taylor's arguments. He says, " If I by my silence 
should have given way to them, I should have been 
highly guilty, and deservedly lost myself in the opinion 
of all good men." The stir produced among churchmen 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 123 

by the Unurn Necessarium justified, it must be admitted, 
Duppa's nervous apprehensions. 

The book has long ceased to awaken alarm, and its 
principal fault may now seem to be a wearisome pro- 
lixity, a hammering at nails which were already up to 
their heads in every instructed conscience. Probably, 
but for one chapter, the nature of which has already 
been briefly mentioned, even seventeenth-century readers 
would not have been scandalised by it. The Unum 
Necessarium is a treatise written with the purpose "that 
the strictnesses of a holy life be thought necessary, and 
that repentance may be no more that trifling little 
piece of duty to which the errors of the late schools 
of learning, and the desires of men to be deceived in 
this article, have reduced it." This was a subject fit 
for a single sermon, but it scarcely needed such very 
lengthy treatment in so thick a volume. But the 
importance of repentance had been interesting Taylor 
more and more ; it was "a catholicon to the evils of the 
soul of every man." The book is, in fact, a chip, or 
rather a log, from the workshop of his immense Ductor 
Dubitantium. His investigations into the psychology of 
conscience led him to insist on the necessity of a holy 
life. He found people willing to go on living in a 
condition of sin without danger or reproof, hoping 
all would be well at the last. This state of mind was 
a stumbling-block to Jeremy Taylor, who argued, 
properly enough, that if a holy life is not necessary, 
it is mere waste of time for a theologian to go into 
a vast series of nice cases of conscience. But what 
are men bound to repent of 1 This question led him 
into the very thorny province of original sin, where 
unfortunately he was the victim of what one of his 



124 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

warmest admirers has called "an inaccuracy of reason- 
ing which led him into a partial heterodoxy." The 
heresy consisted in a denial "that the depravation of 
man's nature after the fall was so total as had been 
generally apprehended." This conviction led Taylor 
to hold that repentance is not applicable to original 
sin, because a man cannot be asked to repent of a state 
of things entirely beyond his own control. 

It was the chapter on original sin, and not the 
treatment of death-bed repentances, which caused 
the scandal. In fact, as regards the second of these 
dogmas, the author slightly reduces the severity which 
he had shown in earlier books, and here he was sup- 
ported by a capable champion in Hammond. But his 
treatment of the former found no friends, and Taylor 
continued to languish under a suspicion of Pelagian 
error which affected all the rest of his career. The 
private correspondence of the time, even more than 
the published attacks, proves the dismay with which 
the chapter on original sin was received. An appeal was 
made to the venerable Sanderson, as the most dignified 
churchman of the age, to refute it ; but, as a curious 
letter, now in the Bodleian, from Sanderson to Barlow 
shows, without avail. Sanderson shrewdly considered 
that "in these times of so much distraction, as little 
notice should be taken of differences amongst ourselves 
as is possible." Moreover, Taylor, who usually for- 
warded presentation copies of his works to Sanderson 
as soon as they appeared, had been careful not to 
send the Unum Necessarium to that Bishop, who, as 
late as September 25, 1656, had not so much as seen it. 
Others were not so discreet as Sanderson. Dr. Peter 
Samwayes, writing apparently to Sancroft, declares 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 125 

in an unpublished letter that he "values not what 
Dr. Taylor says unless it be according to the Scrip- 
tures and the doctrine of the Church," and urges a 
general repudiation of his errors. Warner was dread- 
fully distressed, and declared that "Pelagius had 
puddied the stream " of Taylor's faith. The amiable 
and indulgent Sheldon expostulated with Taylor for 
his "folly and frowardness." Never was such a con- 
sensus of reprobation. But Taylor remained quite 
calm under the storm, and theological opinion nowa- 
days will record, without the least horror, that, in his 
opinion, though not, perhaps, in his arguments, he 
was, as usual, far ahead of his age in liberality. 

He occupied the close of his imprisonment at Chep- 
stow Castle in replying to the objections of his critics 
in a little volume, called Deus Justificatus, in which he 
stood to his guns, and charged the Anglican divines 
with having borrowed their gloss from the Presby- 
terians. This reply took the form of a letter to 
Christiana, Dowager Countess of Devonshire, who 
appears to have befriended him in prison, and who 
perr ips sent him, with a gift of money, a request 
for a further explanation of his theory. This lady 
was equally interested in poetry and in theology. 
She kept open house for the. Eoyalist wits at 
Eoehampton, and had been celebrated in verse by 
Donne in her girlhood, and by Waller in her middle 
life. It is not certain in what manner the Deus Justi- 
ficatus reached the public. Eoyston published it in 
1656, not only without the author's consent, but 
apparently without Lady Devonshire's knowledge. 
In a letter, Eoyston says that Taylor was very angry 
with him, and the publisher grovelled with excuses, 



126 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

for Taylor was perhaps the most valuable author on 
his list. We may doubt whether Taylor was really 
displeased at this publication, or at that of his cor- 
respondence on the same subject with Bishop Warner. 
In writing from Chepstow Castle in September 1656 
Taylor says that "the gentlemen under whose custody 
I am, as they are careful of their charges, so are they 
civil to my person." At first they seem to have 
prevented him from receiving letters, but this embargo 
was presently removed. On the 5th of November 
Sheldon forgave him in a kind letter, in which he 
relieved him of an old debt, and apparently lent him a 
further sum which enabled him to regain his freedom. 
A few days later Taylor has left his prison, but he 
retires, not to Golden Grove, which was to see him 
no more, but to Man-dinam, whither, apparently, his 
children had already found an asylum with Joanna 
Bridges. Of this lady little is known, and a mystery 
hangs over her birth. The egregious Lady Wray 
pretended to believe that Joanna was a natural child 
of King Charles I. ; the estate of Man-dinam was 
certainly her personal property. Whether Taylor 
was already married to her is quite unknown, but 
his extreme poverty in the winter of 1655-56 seems 
to preclude the idea. She was probably at this time 
merely his benefactress, whose hospitality was ex- 
tended to him as a celebrated and afflicted clergyman, 
to whom any Royalist lady of means would be happy 
to offer a home. Man-dinam, which was her property, 
was, and still is, a small country-house on an estate 
two miles east of the village of Llangadock. It is 
romantically situated on a hill above the south side 
of the Bran River, just where that stream narrows its 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 127 

gorge before spreading into the Vale of Towey; it 
commands a fine view south to the Rhiwiau Hills and 
the Black Mountain. Man-dinam is ten or twelve miles 
from Golden Grove, by the road which passes through 
Llandilo and Llangadock ; it remained the property 
of Joanna Bridges after she became Mrs. Taylor, and 
until her death. 

Lord Carbery had by this time married again. His 
new wife was Lady Alice Egerton, daughter of the 
first Earl of Bridgewater, who had died in 1649. It 
was she who, as a child, had taken parts in the Comus 
and in the Arcades of Milton, and to whom, on account 
of her known interest in the art of music, Lawes dedi- 
cated his Airs and Dialogues in 1653. There is evidence 
that Jeremy Taylor tried to propitiate her, in rather 
a clumsy way ; for, when printing a third edition of 
The Great Exemplar, he cancelled the dedication of the 
third book, which he had inscribed to the first countess, 
his dear friend, and inserted a letter of compliment in 
its place to the stranger. There is no evidence that 
Alice, Lady Carbery, took any interest in Taylor, or 
extended any species of patronage to him, and perhaps 
she was not pleased at the divine's reminder that she 
came to Golden Grove as the " successor to a very dear 
and most excellent person." 

Evelyn, who, as has been said, seems to have had 
some good reason for being unwilling to help his friend 
as long as he was in Chepstow Castle, now hastened to 
offer counsel and aid. He advised Taylor to come at 
once to town, but the reply (on the 5th of January 1656) 
was, " Sir, I know not when I shall be able to come to 
London, for our being stripped of the little relics of our 
fortune remaining after the shipwreck leaves not cordage 



128 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

or sails sufficient to bear me thither." He was in sorry 
plight, indeed, for some one now "blew the coals," and 
stirred up fresh resentment in his only friend among 
the bishops, Sheldon. In spite of his wretched poverty, 
however, and the pressure from all sides, Taylor per- 
sisted in refusing to recant his views, or explain them 
away. But Evelyn had now interested in the case 
Mr. Thurland (afterwards Sir Edward and a baron of 
the Exchequer), who was a prominent Royalist lawyer, 
and a zealous supporter of the church. A proposition 
was made that Taylor should undertake some work of 
propaganda, and on the 19 th of January he is expecting 
suddenly to go into Nottinghamshire for a fortnight. 
As he had no money of his own, this must have been 
a professional journey paid for by a client, in all pro- 
bability Thurland, whose country-house was G-amelton 
Hall, in Nottinghamshire. Nothing seems to have been 
arranged at once, and it was a very dangerous time, 
for there was a recrudescence of persecution, and 
Cromwell was showing renewed severity to the clergy. 
Two months later Evelyn is alarmed with "apprehen- 
sions" of Taylor's "danger," an alarm which presently 
subsides under some report of a fortunate nature. 
But " the daily sacrifice is ceasing, and the exercise of 
[sacerdotal] functions is made criminal, and the light 
of Israel is quenched." But " Julianus Eedivivus can 
shut the schools, indeed, and the temples, but he cannot 
hinder our private intercourses and devotions, where 
the breast is the chapel and our heart is the altar." 
Then follows a little period of repose, when the eye 
of the accuser seems to be removed from our divine, 
and we find him enjoying easy social intercourse with 
the excellent Evelyn and his friends. 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 129 

Evelyn carried his confessor off to Sayes Court, 
where on the 12th of April the house-party comprised, 
besides Taylor, two of the most eminent living men 
of science, Eobert Boyle, the natural philosopher, and 
John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham, who was just 
about to marry Cromwell's sister Robinia. The 
acquaintance of Wilkins, who, although on the popular 
side, was anxious to propitiate the distressed clergy 
and to lighten their burdens, must have been par- 
ticularly valuable to Taylor at this juncture. Wilkins 
and Evelyn were now extremely intimate, while the 
new relation of the latter with Taylor was increasing 
Evelyn's zeal for the Anglican form of religion. 

It is now necessary to examine a bibliographical 
crux which has greatly puzzled Jeremy Taylor's 
biographers, and is of some vital importance. If we 
were to decide that the Auxiliary Beauty is a genuine 
work of Taylor, we should be obliged to modify our 
estimate of his character in some curious particulars. 
In the course of the agitated year 1656 Royston 
published a small anonymous volume, entitled A Dis- 
course of Auxiliary Beauty, or Artificial Handsomeness. 
In Point of Conscience between Two Ladies. This is in 
fact a treatise in defence of the use of cosmetics, in 
the form of a dialogue between two persons of quality, 
the one an austerely Puritanic lady, "a severe 
censurer of all extern helps to beauty," the other an 
orthodox churchwoman of a more modern type, who 
claims the right, as a Christian woman, of repairing 
by the use of rouge and similar appliances the ravages 
of her complexion. The Puritan makes a very feeble 
resistance, and, although she produces "a black and 
ponderous cloud of witnesses," she is borne down by 
I 



130 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

the tide of arguments and instances poured forth by 
her opponent. The line of defence is briefly this, that 
no one objects to the restoration of the teeth or even 
the hair by artificial means ; for instance, we may 
"use, if we list, a crystal, painted eye," and give no 
offence to the most precise. The cosmeticist asks, in 
triumph, "When was your ladyship scandalised with 
any grave and sober matron because she laid out the 
combings or cuttings of her own hair or others' more 
youthful hair, when her own, now more withered and 
autumnal, seemed less becoming to her ? " Why, then, 
be so pedantic as to object to a touch of ceruse on the 
faded cheek 1 

Quite early there arose a legend that Jeremy Taylor 
was connected with this somewhat ingenious piece of 
special pleading. It was brought out by Taylor's 
publisher, and in 1662 a second edition of it appeared 
with the initials " J. T., D.D." on the title-page, initials 
which Taylor himself had used in publishing his own 
avowed secular production, the Discourse of Friendship. 
This was five years before his death, and we have no 
evidence that he took any steps to deny the impeach- 
ment ; it is true that he had left London at the time, 
and was in Ireland. In the third edition the attribu- 
tion to "a late learned bishop" was more explicit still, 
and the work continues to figure in our bibliographical 
catalogues of Taylor's works. Meanwhile Anthony a 
Wood had included the Auxiliary Beauty in a list of 
the writings of Jeremy Taylor, while, finally, White 
Kennett, Bishop of Peterborough, also attributed it to 
him. This evidence of Kennett's merely shows that 
after the Restoration it was general subject of gossip 
that Taylor had composed this discourse. Such is the 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 131 

external evidence, and if it collected around a work 
which was in harmony with Taylor's character and 
bore evidence of his style, it must be confessed that it 
could hardly be resisted. 

But in this case internal evidence is overwhelming 
in the other scale of the balance. In the first instance, 
if we turn to the treatise itself we find the publisher 
making a definite statement. The MS. was brought to 
him, he says, anonymously ; but, " of this discourse, 
as i am certainly informed, a woman was not only the 
chief occasion, but the author and writer." Every- 
thing in the body of the tract supports this view. It 
is an example of the kind of picturesque, audacious 
writing which women were, at that moment in the 
history of our literature, beginning to introduce, and 
of which there had already been several striking 
examples. There is a certain amount of theology in 
it, especially towards the end, where two Puritan 
books of the reign of James I., Downham's Christian 
Warfare and Perkins's Cases of Conscience, are carefully 
controverted so far as they forbid the use of cosmetics. 
Some of Taylor's pet phrases are introduced, not, how- 
ever, as he would use them himself, but as a lady who 
had attended his ministrations might be expected to 
repeat them. Taylor may be referred to as "a witty 
and eloquent preacher whom we both heard at Oxford." 
Examples of what may be called the pseudo-Taylorian 
manner may easily be found ; for instance, the Cosmetic 
Lady speaks of " persons who sometimes appear 
pallidly sad, as if they were going to their graves, 
otherwhiles with such a rosy cheerfulness, as if they 
had begun their resurrection." This is a conscious or 
unconscious parody of Taylor's style, but no one who 



132 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

is accustomed to his phrases will mistake it for the 
genuine thing. Even more hopelessly unlike is the 
attitude of the writer, her pious levity, her lack of 
all real spirituality, her superficial unction in making 
the best of both worlds. Finally, all the external 
evidence which could be produced would fail to per- 
suade us that Jeremy Taylor wrote, especially in the 
sad and troubled year 1656, pert sentences of which 
the following is a very fair example, where the author, 
after saying that the clergy had objected to tobacco, 
remarks that now they have generally taken it to 
themselves, "fancying at last that they never had 
more devout meditations or sharp inventions than 
those begotten by a pipe of good tobacco, which now 
perfumes their clothes, their books, their studies, and 
their sermons " ; and this, not in reproof, but in sheer 
levity. 

It would be pitiful to take this satyr for our 
Hyperion, yet there persists in the mind a feeling that 
Taylor must have been in some way concerned with 
the Auxiliary Beauty for so strenuous a legend to 
connect him with it. There is every likelihood that 
the title is his. In my own mind the probable issue 
is that Taylor was intrusted with the MS., perhaps 
against his will, by some great lady in the orthodox 
camp, whose request that he would submit it to 
Royston it was impossible for him to refuse. Such a 
lady might very probably be Christiana, Countess of 
Devonshire, a blue-stocking, an ardent churchwoman, 
a relic of the old Oxford days, and a frequenter of the 
worldly wits. She was an admirer of Taylor, she had 
lately made him a debtor by her benevolence, and for 
all her formal piety, she was nothing of a precisian. 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 133 

If we suppose Lady Devonshire making the request, it 
is difficult to see how Taylor could possibly decline to 
submit her MS. to Eoyston, and if she went further 
and asked him to read it and even to revise, he would 
find in it nothing to which he could take any direct 
objection. The present writer must, however, endorse 
Heber's opinion, and say that he little cares who may 
have written the Auxiliary Beauty, " provided it does 
not pass for Taylor's." The difficulty, however, still 
remains that Taylor did not deny the authorship in 
his lifetime. 

The exact business which attracted Taylor to 
London in the early months of 1656 is nowhere pre- 
cisely stated, but it was connected with Mr. Thurland, 
and it was of a confidentially ecclesiastical character. 
The jealousy of the government and the watchful zeal 
of Cromwell's myrmidons well account for the secrecy 
which was preserved. But Taylor was evidently 
engaged in some agency which aimed at keeping up 
communication between the ejected bishops and their 
clergy. On the 6th of May Evelyn brought a young 
French Sorbonnist, M. Le Franc, who was an Anglican 
convert, "to converse with Dr. Taylor," who was much 
pleased with him, and recommended him to a divine 
whom Evelyn calls "the Bishop of Meath." This is a 
slip of the pen, for the deprived Bishop of Meath had 
long been dead, and none other, of course, could be 
appointed to the vacant see, until the Restoration. 
Whoever the prelate was, he was " very poor and in 
great want," and only too glad to get the fees, which 
Evelyn paid, with the exclamation, " To that necessity 
are our clergy reduced ! " In July Mr. Thurland's 
"kindnesses" make it possible that Taylor will be 



134 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

able to settle in or near London, which he would do at 
once, if only he were not "hindered by my res angusta 
domi." He is waiting to see the Deus Justificatus 
published, and then hopes to come to a definite under- 
standing with Mr. Thurland. 

We have heard nothing of Jeremy Taylor's family 
since the death of his wife in 1651. It appears that 
his mother-in-law, Mrs. Langsdale, formed part of his 
household at Golden Grove, having doubtless come to 
take charge of his motherless children. A letter dated 
November 24, 1653, written to his brother-in-law, "at 
his apothecary's house in Gainsborough," exemplifies 
the writer's tenderness. Edward Langsdale has been 
dangerously ill, but Taylor had not had the heart to 
alarm his mother, until news came of the patient's 
recovery, when she could be "troubled and pleased at 
the same time.'' He was a kind and solicitous parent, 
cultivating towards his children "sweetness of con- 
versation, affability, frequent admonitions, all significa- 
tions of love and tenderness, care and watchfulness." 
After they had lost their mother, he redoubled his 
solicitude, and was more than ever "pitiful and gentle, 
complying with all their infirmities." But now, just 
at the moment when he was broken in fortune and 
uprooted from his resting-place, he was to be most 
cruelly afflicted in his tenderest feelings. Early in 
July 1656 a little son died, — "A boy," says his father 
in writing to Evelyn, "that lately made us very glad, 
but now he rejoices in his little orb, while we think 
and sigh and long to be as safe as he is." But there 
was worse in store for him. 

Early in 1657 there broke out an epidemic of small- 
pox at Man-dinam, and " two sweet hopeful boys " of 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 135 

Jeremy Taylor's were among the victims. He had 
now, of five sons, but one surviving, Charles, who was 
to die a few days before his father in 1667. The sons 
who died in 1657 have been spoken of as "young 
men," but the elder of them could not have been more 
than fourteen years of age. The blow to their father 
was overwhelming; "I shall tell you," he writes to 
Evelyn, "that I have passed through a great cloud 
which hath wetted me deeper than the skin." His 
sorrow was so bitter that it rendered him "an object 
of every good man's pity and commiseration." He 
could think of nothing else, and had to beg pardon of 
Thurland for neglecting his business and failing to 
reply to his letters. At length, about Easter, he shook 
off his depression, and determined to leave Wales for 
good. Rust says that the loss of his sons so sensibly 
affected his spirits, that he could no longer endure to 
live in the place where they had been. He came up 
to London and settled in secret, doubtless under 
Thurland's protection. Jeremy Taylor now withdraws 
for a while beneath a dense cloud, through which we 
perceive no more light than is given us by the state- 
ment that "he officiated in a private congregation of 
loyalists, to his great hazard and danger." As the 
year proceeded, the difficulties in the way of Anglican 
public worship became insurmountable. In August 
Evelyn notes that for the first time the Church has 
been "reduced to a chamber and a conventicle, so 
sharp is the persecution," and zealous Christians met in 
private houses. Even then they were liable to be 
disturbed by sudden raids of soldiers, who dispersed 
the worshippers with their muskets. In this sorrowful 
condition the godly were thrust back upon contempla- 



136 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

tion and reverie, and from the suffering Church of 
England there arose a murmur of resignation, and a 
song of — 

" crux ave spes unica 
Hoc passionis tempore : 
Auge piis justitiam, 
Reisque dona veniam." 

Taylor's patience had sustained the burden of all the 
attacks which had been made upon it, when it suddenly 
gave way beneath a straw. A certain bitter Puritan 
divine, Henry Jeanes by name, was rector of Chedzoy 
in Somerset. He was a provocative disputant, dab- 
bling much in printers' ink, and "pecking and hewing 
continually at logic and physics." On a summer's day, 
a friend of his came out from Bridgwater to visit 
Jeanes; this gentleman, Mr. T. C, was a very ardent 
admirer of Jeremy Taylor. He sang his praises so 
loudly that Jeanes, who had begun by assenting, and 
by acknowledging Taylor's "admirable wit, great 
parts, quick and elegant pen, abilities in critical learn- 
ing, and profound skill in antiquity," felt obliged to 
remark what a pity it was that Taylor held erroneous 
ideas on various points, and particularly on the subject 
of original sin. A copy of the Deus Justificatus 
happened to lie on the window-sill of the rectory at 
Chedzoy, and the friends began to turn over its pages. 
When Jeanes, thoroughly exasperated, had called the 
book a mass of gross nonsense and blasphemy, T. C. 
became scandalised, refused to argue any more, and 
announced that he should lay Jeanes's objections before 
Jeremy Taylor himself. Jeanes agreed, but insisted 
on writing out those objections in a letter ; which was 
duly forwarded. To this Taylor made a stubborn 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 137 

reply, and Jeanes, now quite in his element, flung 
himself into the fray. Taylor was full of troubles and 
anxieties at the time, and, as he wrote to the Matchless 
Orinda, "so pushed at by herds and flocks of people 
that follow anybody that whistles to them, or drives 
them to pasture, that I am grown afraid of any truth 
that seems chargeable with singularity." His replies 
to Jeanes's attacks show his irritability by their 
violence and roughness. Jeanes, who was engaged in 
fighting Hammond in 1657, did not print the corre- 
spondence with Taylor until 1660, when he brought it 
out in a little quarto, and also published a volume 
called Original Righteousness, which was a venomous 
diatribe against Taylor. It is to be feared that, in 
delaying the publication of his attacks until the 
Restoration, Jeanes was acting maliciously. Taylor 
took no further notice of him. 

In May of this year a plan which Evelyn had long 
entertained of a subscription for the support of Jeremy 
Taylor seems to have been carried out. Several 
wealthy Royalists, " sensible of this opportunity to do 
God and their country an acceptable service," guaran- 
teed an annual salary, in return for which he was to 
preach in private houses, administer the communion, 
and perform other priestly offices confidentially, with- 
out attracting the notice of the authorities. An ex- 
tremely grateful and loving letter from Taylor (May 
15) testifies to the relief which this arrangement 
gave to his anxious care. His whole prospect, which 
had been very dark for the past three years, now 
sensibly brightened, and we see the effect in the gay 
and graceful composition which proceeded next from 
his pen. In the month of June he finished and sent 



138 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

to press his beautiful Discourse of Friendship, which 
appeared before the summer of 1657 reached its close. 
All through this year the references to Evelyn are 
numerous, and we find Taylor frequently going down 
to Sayes Court for a burial or a christening, to confirm 
the faith of the residents, or simply to be himself 
refreshed by his host's liberal and graceful hospitality. 
At what date Jeremy Taylor formed the acquaint- 
ance of Orinda is uncertain. That eminent lady, whose 
real name was Mrs. Katherine Philips, had come to 
South Wales in 1647, in her seventeenth year, as the 
wife of a Eoyalist gentleman, the owner of Cardigan 
Priory. One of her pieces is a greeting to the third 
Countess of Carbery on her marriage; but with this 
exception her curious and tantalising collection of very 
personal poems does not connect her with the little 
group of friends at Golden Grove. Mrs. Philips is 
supposed to have adopted the name of Orinda in 1651, 
when she began to collect around her at Cardigan a 
Society of Friendship, to which men were admitted, 
but which mainly consisted of women. Orinda was 
not pretty, but she was extremely animated, witty, 
and agreeable. She became, in those dark days, very 
easily the unquestioned Muse and Sibyl of South 
Wales. She dubbed the members of her society by 
romantic names, such as Eosania, Polycrite, Poliarchus, 
and Eegina. Under these pseudonyms she addressed 
her friends, but particularly the ladies, in terms of 
burning enthusiasm. Sometimes she inadvertently 
gave the same name to two persons in succession, as 
when she called a Mr. Francis Finch "the excellent 
Palsemon," and then transferred the title, as " the noble 
Palaemon," to Jeremy Taylor, with this result, that a 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 139 

long poem which she addressed either to the one or to 
the other " on his incomparable Discourse of Friendship " 
has been supposed to belong to Finch, although there 
is no reason to believe that he ever wrote anything of 
the kind. 

Although she lived buried in the country, was only 
twenty-six years of age, and had published nothing, 
Orinda was already celebrated. She was introducing 
a new sort of sentimentality, an effusive celebration of 
friendship between persons of the same sex, which was 
quite fresh in England, and which attracted a great 
deal of attention. Her verses, which lack colour and 
music, but are not without intellectual strength, were 
passed eagerly from hand to hand. Orinda took very 
high ground ; she proposed something novel in philo- 
sophy and in morals, and she wished to link her newly 
discovered virtue with piety. In one of her odes to 
the most adored of her companions, Miss Anne Owen 
of Landshipping, she had exclaimed — 

" Come, my Lucasia, since we see 

That miracles man's faith do move, 
By wonder and by prodigy 

To the dull, angry world let 's prove 
There 's a religion in our love." 

Perhaps the dull, angry world of Cardigan had 
challenged this assertion, for Orinda laid before Jeremy 
Taylor the inquiry : "How far is a dear and perfect 
friendship authorised by the principles of Christianity V 
His reply grew into what is one of the most beautiful 
of his minor writings, A Discourse of the Nature and 
Offices of Friendship, which appeared in 1657, with a 
dedication to " the most ingenious and excellent Mrs. 
Katharine Philips." 



140 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

After a splendid compliment to the lady, already 
" so eminent in friendships," Taylor begins to examine 
the theme in his customary lucid way, but with more 
melody and amenity than he had shown in his writings 
for several years past. He is less strenuous in this 
social matter than he is accustomed to be in matters of 
theology. He admits that the New Testament does 
not recognise friendship as a Christian virtue, in 
Orinda's sense, but deals with charity to mankind, 
which is of universal warrant. Yet the whole may 
include the part, and as our graces here below are all 
imperfect, we must make the best we can of those 
partial and fragmentary instincts which drive us to 
cultivate the affections of certain persons whom we 
isolate from the mass of those who claim our universal 
charity. In theory friendship should embrace all the 
inhabitants of the globe ; but our hearts are finite, and 
in practice our love is limited. 

"Some have only a dark day and a long night from [the 
sun], snows and white cattle, a miserable life, and a perpetual 
harvest of catarrhs and consumptions, apoplexies and dead 
palsies. But some have splendid fires and aromatic spices, 
rich wines and well-digested fruits, great wit and great courage, 
because they dwell in his eye, and look in his face, and are 
the courtiers of the sun, and wait upon him in his chambers 
of the east. Just so it is in friendships. Some are worthy, 
and some are necessary. Some dwell hard by and are fitted 
for converse. Nature joins some to us, and religion combines 
us with others. Society and accidents, parity of fortune and 
equal dispositions do actuate our friendships ; which, of them- 
selves and in their prime disposition, are prepared for all man- 
kind according as any one can receive them. - " 

From this Taylor proceeds to indicate how strong, 
and how legitimate a part must be taken by instinctive 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 141 

attraction in the approach to one another of those who 
are about to become friends. Many qualities enter 
into the alchymy of this enchanting state, which is 
"nothing but love and society mixed together." He 
dwells on the innocency of it, the subtlety, the refresh- 
ment and cordial which it gives to the soul, and he 
bids those who are mutually attracted not to resist 
the magnetism, but to fly to one another, to enjoy the 
transports of sympathy and happiness, only being 
careful not to be so infatuated as to be unable to 
pass judgment on the moral worth of the proposed 
friend. Charm of conversation, unity of interests, wit, 
physical beauty and harmony of thought, all these he 
admits as natural and proper forces leading to the 
mystery of friendship, but there should be close care 
taken, before the two souls are blinded by intimacy, 
that none of these is at work alone, but that the soul 
of him towards which our soul leans forward is pure 
and honest. He will not make a man his ^nivado, his 
special and peculiar friend, unless he be a good as well 
as an attractive one. 

" I choose this man " he says " to be my friend, because he is 
able to give me counsel, to restrain my wanderings, to comfort 
me in my sorrows. He is pleasant to me in private and useful 
in public. He will make my joys double, and divide my grief 
between himself and me. For what else should I choose him ? 
For being a fool and useless ? For a pretty face and a smooth 
chin ? I confess it is possible to be a friend to one who is 
ignorant and pitiable, handsome and good-for-nothing, that 
eats well and drinks deep. But he cannot be a friend to me, 
and I love him with a fondness or a pity, but it cannot be a 
noble friendship." 

When once he is launched on a disquisition of what 
friendship is, and what it means in a man's private 



142 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

life, as a source of comfort and refreshment, his elo- 
quence knows no bounds; he proceeds in a kind of 
golden rapture, the fancies clustering round him and 
delaying the progress of his argument. Nowhere is 
he more dithyrambic : — 

" I will love a worthy friend that can delight me as well as 
profit me, rather than him who cannot delight me at all, and 
profit me no more. Yet I will not weigh the gayest flowers, 
or the wings of butterflies, against wheat ; but when I am to 
choose wheat, I may take that which looks the brightest. I 
had rather see thyme and roses, marjoram and July flowers, 
that are fair and sweet and medicinal, than the prettiest tulijDS 
that are good for nothing. My sheep and kie are better 
servants than race-horses and greyhounds, and I shall rather 
furnish my study with Plutarch and Cicero, with Livy and 
Polybius, than with Cassandra and Ibrahim Bassa. If I do 
give an hour to these for divertisement or pleasure, yet I will 
dwell with them that can instruct me, and make me wise and 
eloquent, severe and useful to myself and others." 

He refers to the "immortal abstracted pure friend- 
ships " of the Greeks, and gratifies the pedantry of the 
Matchless Orinda by quotations from Theognis and 
Theocritus, to which he is careful to append translations 
of his own. In particular, he dwells on that "com- 
mendation of the bravest friendship" which he finds 
in the twelfth idyl, the J Ai/n?9, of the Sicilian poet, part 
of which he turns into English neatly enough : — 

" They loved each other with a love 
That did in all things equal prove ; 
The world was under Saturn's reign, 
When he that loved was loved again." 

It is interesting, and characteristic of the exquisite tact 
with which, in all his works, Taylor employs the honey 
of the classics without a touch of their poison, that he 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 143 

passes so deftly over the rather delicate ground in- 
volved in these citations. 

But all his reflections have been leading him to 
glorify the friendship of man with man. His gallantry 
reminds him that Orinda's verses celebrate that of 
woman with woman. He will not exclude this class 
of emotion, though he thinks it rarer, and apt to be 
more trivial and on a lower plane. Alas ! if all could 
share the transcendental raptures of the incomparable 
Mrs. Philips, then indeed 

" twin souls in one should grow, 
And teach the world new love, 
Redeem the age and sex, and show 
A flame Fate dares not move." 

But Taylor hints that his enthusiastic young corre- 
spondent has achieved this redemption, or is on the 
high road to achieve it. Her example will show that 
although a woman is not likely to prove so good a 
counsellor as a wise man, she may be no less tender 
and no less loyal. " A woman can love as passionately, 
and converse as pleasantly, and retain a secret as 
faithfully"; and "she can die for her friend as well 
as the bravest Roman knight." It is hard if Mrs. 
Philips was not satisfied with this. But her advocate 
must guard and guide, so he proceeds to draw up a 
code of laws, or maxims, for the prudent conduct of 
friendship ; and then sums up with a burst of emotional 
eloquence not to be surpassed even in his own 
writings : — 

" As an eye that dwells long upon a star must be refreshed 
with greens and looking-glasses, lest the sight become amazed 
with too great a splendour, so must the love of friends some- 
times be refreshed with material and low caresses. Lest by 



144 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

striving to be too divine it become less human, it must be 
allowed its share of both. It is human in giving pardon, and 
fair construction, and openness, and ingenuity, and keeping 
secrets. It hath something that is divine, because it is 
beneficent, but much, because it is eternal." 

It has been needful to dwell at some length on the 
Discourse of Friendship, not merely because it is Taylor's 
sole contribution to secular literature, but because it 
reveals to us sides of his character and temperament 
which would otherwise be unknown. Sometimes, as 
particularly in the rather harsh letter in which he 
reproves, by implication, Evelyn's pride in the gardens 
and buildings of Sayes Court, Jeremy Taylor faintfy 
repels us by an excess of sanctity. He seems a little 
too seraphic for human nature's needs. He was a 
firm and jealous guide of souls. But A Discourse of 
Friendship survives to assure us of his geniality, his 
acceptance of the social requirements of the creature, 
and of his own participation in the unselfish joys of 
life. Here he is neither mystical, nor sacerdotal. 
Here he confesses to the weakness which longs for 
comfort, to the depression of spirits which finds a 
cure in friendly sympathy, to the attraction which 
rests on no logical basis but is an instinct. He seems 
to have read, and to have accepted, Montaigne's 
phrase about La Boetie : " Je l'aimais parce que 
c'etait lui, parce que c'etait moi." The other writings 
of Jeremy Taylor supply us with ample reason to 
admire him ; the Discourse gives us authority to love 
him. 

Taylor was anxious that this treatise should not 
pass into the wrong hands. He asked Orinda, if she 
did not wish to publish it herself, to consign the MS. 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 145 

to the keeping of Sir John Wedderburn. But she had 
no idea of wrapping up her treasure in a napkin ; she 
published it immediately in folio. Wedderburn, who 
was "reckoned among his best friends" by Jeremy 
Taylor, was the great Eoyalist physician of the day. 
He had attended Charles I. and he was useful to 
Charles II. before and after the Eestoration. Although, 
or perhaps because, he made no secret of his ardent 
Eoyalist proclivities, he amassed a large fortune during 
the Commonwealth. Anthony a Wood celebrates the 
Scotch doctor's noble hospitality and kindness to all 
who were learned and virtuous, and he was not only 
Taylor's intimate friend, but he attended him in each 
of his illnesses. 

Although, from an obscure reference in a letter 
from Evelyn to the Governor of the Tower, it has been 
conjectured that in January 1657 Taylor for a third 
time suffered brief imprisonment, his position on the 
whole, though still perilous, was now less uncomfort- 
able. We hear no more of grinding poverty ; his 
subscriptions from the pious sufficed for his needs. 
English churchmen were now rigorously deprived of 
"the priest's power and external act," but persecution 
was more often threatened than carried out. 

In May 1657 Taylor collected his works for the first 
time in a substantial folio volume ; he continued to make 
efforts to publish his Dudor Dubitantium, and as Eoyston 
still shrank from so huge an undertaking, he proposed 
to print it at his own expense. He did not do this, but 
that he should have thought of doing it shows that he 
was no longer pressed for money. He was now the 
most popular theologian of the age, but he wrote little 
during these two years. He probably had no time for 
K 



146 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

literature, for he was amply engaged by his mysterious 
occupations. 

A glimpse of Jeremy Taylor in his pastoral capacity 
is offered us by his sermon preached at the funeral of 
Sir George Dalstone. This gentleman was a member 
of parliament from the county of Cumberland, who, 
being troubled by vexatious lawsuits, had given up the 
charge of his estates into the hands of his son, and had 
come up to London, where he devoted himself entirely 
to religion and philanthropy. He was in church one 
day, listening to the discourse, "for he was a great 
lover of sermons," when he was attacked by a paralytic 
seizure, and, being very old, was not expected to 
recover. Jeremy Taylor, who was probably the very 
preacher to whom he had been listening, was hastily 
called upon to attend him with the Holy Sacrament ; 
it does not appear that they had ever spoken to one 
another before. But Sir George Dalstone did not 
immediately die, and during his last illness Taylor 
"often visited him," and found in him "a very quiet 
conscience." His decline was prolonged much beyond 
expectation, and through the course of it Taylor was 
greatly edified by the aged knight's serenity and 
beautiful attitude of readiness, and formed a very 
warm attachment to him. When at length Sir George 
Dalstone died, and was buried on the 28th of Sep- 
tember 1657, Jeremy Taylor preached an unusually 
long and elaborate sermon at the funeral. 

The nature of his clerical work seems to have been 
principally consultative rather than pastoral. He had 
a special charge to deal with persons who were tempted 
to change their religion, in particular, to join the 
Church of Rome. Some of his confidential letters to 



iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 147 

great ladies on points of conscience and delicate family 
matters have been preserved ; one of them, still among 
the Duke of Rutland's MSS. at Belvoir, is addressed, in 
1658, from Annesley to the Countess of Rutland. 
These letters hint at the personal risk Jeremy Taylor 
runs in carrying out his priestly task. He writes, for 
instance in 1657, " I bless God I am safely arrived where 
I desired to be after my unwilling departure from the 
place of your abode and danger." This is very 
cryptic, but it suggests the peril which attended one 
whose business in life it had become secretly to urge 
people to preserve the advantages of orthodox doctrine. 
But no further personal inconvenience seems to have 
attended him, until in 1658 he was translated to 
another and a fatal sphere of labour. 



CHAPTER V 

PORTMORE 

(1658-1661) 

Of Edward, the third viscount (and afterwards first 
earl of) Conway, not much is preserved. But he was a 
pious and active Irish landlord, devoted to the Anglican 
church, and a convinced although not fanatical loyalist. 
He took his second title of Lord Killultagh from a 
district, "the woods of Ulster," in the south-western 
part of County Antrim, where his estates were bordered 
by Lough Neagh. His residence was called Portmore, 
in the parish of Ballinderry; it was a magnificent 
house, erected by the first viscount, after plans executed 
by Inigo Jones, and here Lord Conway resided in 
great state. The nearest town to him was Lisburn, or, 
as it was then called, Lismagarry, where there seems to 
have existed a collegiate church, in which the vicar 
taught divinity. This incumbent was a Presbyterian 
(or rather what was styled an Independent), but part 
of his fees, it would appear, were paid by Lord 
Conway and other subscribers, who therefore felt at 
liberty to exercise some pressure upon him. His name 
was Andrew Weeke, a man of some notable force of 
character, who had been minister of Lisburn since 
1651. The attention of Lord Conway was drawn 

148 



chap, v.] PORTMORE 149 

to the neglected state of the English church in that 
part of Ireland, and he formed the idea of inviting 
a leading churchman over to Lisburn to keep the 
nickering lamp of Anglicanism from being utterly 
extinguished. 

Having consulted Evelyn, Lord Conway was advised 
to try and secure Jeremy Taylor, and in May 1658 he 
"^rote to propose that the divine should accept the 
position of assistant lecturer at Lisburn. Unfortun- 
ately, the stipend offered was so inconsiderable, that it 
would not have paid for the expense and trouble of 
moving himself and his family to Ireland. Moreover, 
the idea of becoming a teacher under the disposal of a 
person like Andrew Weeke, who held views on church 
government diametrically opposed to his, was unwel- 
come to Taylor. He therefore desired Evelyn to give 
his thanks to Lord Conway, but to say that he declined 
the honour. In response to a further appeal, offering 
fresh inducements, Taylor asked Major George Eaw- 
don, Lord Conway's brother-in-law, who commanded 
the garrison in Lisburn, for a frank account of the 
social conditions of that part of Ireland, and his reply 
was so extremely unfavourable that "it discouraged 
him and all his friends from any further thought of 
that country." Lord Conway, however, had thoroughly 
set his heart on securing Taylor, and in June he made 
a third attempt. He was "certain that [Taylor] was 
the choicest person in England appertaining to the 
conscience, ... of excellent parts and an excellent life," 
and he was determined that come to Ulster he should. 
However, he was not blind to the difficulties, and he 
set about removing them on a large scale. As he 
admitted that Taylor's private virtues were not power- 



150 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

ful enough "to purchase his quiet" in that bigoted 
province, Lord Conway took infinite pains to protect 
him. He secured him, through William Petty and Dr. 
Thomas Harrison, "a purchase of land at great advan- 
tage." Dr. Thomas Coxe, afterwards president of the 
College of Physicians, was induced to write and com- 
mend Taylor "very passionately " to the Irish Chan- 
cellor. Taylor was invited to come and converse with 
Lord Conway during a visit the latter paid to Kensing- 
ton, and in all possible ways was urged to try and 
smile on the scheme. Finally, the Lord Protector was 
induced to give him a pass and a protection for himself 
and his family, under his sign-manual and privy signet. 
The difficulty of the stipend was got over, by the 
arrangement that he and his family were to occupy 
rooms in the great house at Portmore, and there was, 
without question, a salary offered as chaplain in Lord 
Conway's family. 

This last arrangement was against the law, and could 
not be discussed in writing. No doubt it was broached 
when Taylor made his preliminary visit early in June 
1658. He yielded; Lord Conway had done so much 
that it would have been ungracious to resist any further. 
The viscount triumphed to his brother-in-law ; he 
recounted the infinite trouble he had taken, and added, 
in reference to his success with Cromwell, " so that I 
hope it will not be treason to look upon [Taylor] and 
own him." Accordingly, Jeremy Taylor's scruples 
were removed, and before the summer of 1658 closed, 
he and all his family removed from London to Port- 
more, to an asylum under the hospitable roof of Lord 
Conway, who seems to have been proud of his company, 
and always delicately solicitous as to his comfort and 



v.] PORTMORE 151 

safety. The quiet and repose were extremely welcome 
to our author. He signs one of the very few letters 
of this period "ex amoenissimo recessu in Portmore," 
"from my most delightful retreat." He left it, as is 
supposed, once a week, to deliver his lecture in Lisburn, 
which was but six Irish miles distant. 

The only ambition Taylor had at this time was to be 
Lt alone, to be undisturbed in his retreat. The recom- 
mendations which his London friends had made on his 
behalf to people in authority at Dublin were cunningly 
devised to achieve this object In the first place, he 
was assured of the protection of " the Lord Peepes," in 
whom we recognise Sir Eichard Pepys, who had been 
Lord Chief Justice of Ireland since 1654, and in contra- 
vention to whose wishes no serious legal step could 
be taken. But unfortunately Pepys died on the 2nd of 
January 1659. Before coming to Ireland, Jeremy Taylor 
had formed what now proved a valuable friendship with 
the eminent Irish orientalist, Dr. Dudley Loftus, who 
was settled in Dublin as vicar-general and judge of the 
prerogative court. Loftus, a fine scholar, though it is 
said rather a nighty person, stood high in Cromwell's 
favour. Very important, too, was the protection of Dr. 
Thomas Harrison, who must not be confounded with 
the regicide. The former was the minister of a dis- 
senting chapel in Dublin, who had made himself very 
prominent in politics, and who in 1657 went over 
rather ostentatiously to Henry Cromwell's party. He 
was rewarded by the governor's confidence, and his 
advice was constantly asked for and acted upon. He 
became almost a court chaplain in Dublin, and when in 
1658 he published his extremely successful manual of 
piety called Topica Sacra, he was the most popular 



152 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

divine in Ireland. This was a very valuable friend for 
Jeremy Taylor to secure. 

But among them all, probably none was so practi- 
cally useful as Dr. (afterwards Sir William) Petty, the 
great statistician and engineer. He had gone over to 
Ireland in 1652, and had at once taken an interest in 
the schemes for transplantation and the redistribution 
of land. To him had been intrusted the famous 
"Down " Survey of the whole of Ireland, and the map 
in which he put the features " down " remains as a 
monument to his industry. He was engaged for years 
in delimiting the forfeited estates throughout Ireland, 
and he had unrivalled opportunities not merely of 
knowing where land was to be got, but of enabling 
favoured persons to secure it on the most moderate 
terms. It is likely that he enabled Taylor to buy the 
farm at Magheralin, which he "provided" for him "at 
great advantage," that is to say, for very little money 
or for none at all. Experienced English farmers were 
extremely welcome, and might almost be bribed to 
settle. Magheralin is just within that portion of 
County Down in which there were specially put aside 
baronies to be divided among the disbanded soldiers 
who were willing to settle. There can be little ques- 
tion that it was one of these which Petty secured for 
Jeremy Taylor. 

One friend at Dublin whom Taylor seems to have won 
for himself, since this was one who was careful to dis- 
play no political bias, was Dr. John Sterne, Archbishop 
Ussher's grand-nephew. He was a very learned man, 
a great doctor, and later on the founder of the Irish 
College of Physicians. Sterne was certainly one of 
the most accomplished persons then living in Ireland. 



v.] PORTMORE 153 

Although distinguished in science, he nourished a great 
fondness for theology, and this was the side of his 
character, no doubt, which attracted Taylor. A warm 
affection sprang up between them, and when Sterne 
published his Thanatologia in 1658, Taylor prefixed to 
it a long Latin epistle of congratulation and com- 
pliment. In 1660 Taylor was able to be of service 
10 Sterne, by warmly recommending him, as a man 
of "great learning and skill in the college affairs," to 
Lord Ormonde for a senior fellowship at Trinity which 
was at the disposal of the chancellor. 

Portmore is ignored by the guide-books, and its very 
site hardly remembered by the antiquaries, but in 
Jeremy Taylor's time it was, as has been said, the 
most magnificent mansion in Ulster. It stood on the 
western side of Lough Beg, a circular satellite of 
the vast Lough Neagh. At present it is difficult to 
find the remains of Portmore, but as the wanderer 
plashes about in the marshy flats, he becomes aware 
of a long line of broken brickwork on the crest of 
a slight eminence looking westward. This ridge, with 
what was evidently a bowling-green or garden in front 
of it, descending to the lake, marks the direction of the 
great terrace which rose from the plans of Inigo Jones 
soon after the rebellion of 1641. Portmore was not 
only a noble residence; it was a fortress garrisoned 
against the Tories of the west. Where now the eye 
perceives nothing but a low harsh horizon of grazing 
land to the north and east, in Lord Conway's time there 
lay a large deer-park of oak-trees. It is probable 
that a bridge, all traces of which have disappeared, 
conducted, in a few minutes from Portmore, across 
the brown and broad trout-stream, to the church in 



154 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

which Jeremy Taylor habitually officiated. To reach 
the latter now it is necessary to take a long, circuitous 
route. One arrives at last quite suddenly at its 
impressive desolation. It stands high on an artificial 
island in the marshes, with a shallow moat encircling 
it, although quite close to the banks of Lough Beg, 
which are so low that the round lake looks like a 
brimming cask buried in the soft soil. The fragments 
of the church are covered heavily with ivy, and a loose 
hedge of seedling larches and sweet-briar enrings them, 
while here and there great cypresses, relics, it is pos- 
sible, of the Italian gardens of Portmore, soar impres- 
sively in the wild, bright place, where there has long 
ceased to be heard any other sound than the cries of 
wildfowl. From up among these ruins, the old frag- 
mentary brickwork of Portmore is better visible than 
from any other point, and imagination may here 
rebuild the vision of it as Jeremy Taylor saw it when 
he arrived in 1658, sumptuous and elaborate, with 
its upper windows looking towards the sunset over 
Lough Beg to the melancholy little inland ocean of 
Lough Neagh. The church was dismantled by Taylor 
himself, when he fitted up his new chapel in Ballin- 
derry, just before his death. Portmore, after being 
enlarged in 1664, lasted scarcely a century longer, and 
was pulled down in 1761 after the extinction of the 
Conway peerage. 

Tradition will have it that the little Sallegh Island, 
or isle of willows, which now lies a few hundred yards 
out in Lough Beg directly north of Portmore, contained 
a study where Jeremy Taylor loved to meditate. It has 
been said that he wrote there in an "arbour," which 
is probably a mere miscomprehension of his phrase 



v.] PORTMORE 155 

about Portmore itself, that it was his "harbour" or 
asylum. At present Sallegh Island, a tangled raft 
of osiers, is unapproachable, and looks from shore as 
though it were mere marshland. It is probable, how- 
ever, that while Portmore was a-building, there was 
framed a little fort on Sallegh, and Taylor may have 
fitted up a study there afterwards. In the old (or 
western) village of Ballinderry are one or two tall 
warehouses, which probably belong to Lord Conway's 
time. The legend that Taylor wrote on Eam's Island, 
far out in Lough Neagh, is preposterous. All we can 
safely say is, that he and his family occupied a suite 
of rooms, from 1658 to 1660, in one of the wings of 
Portmore, and that, doubtless, he stole away from the 
noise of the great house to the islet which is now 
sodden with rains, and to the church which is now two 
gables of crumbling masonry. 

The Presbyterian ministers, who had withdrawn 
from persecution to Scotland, had come back to their 
parishes in 1653 and 1654. They were particularly 
welcome in the diocese of Down and Connor, where 
they found a powerful patron in Lady Clotworthy, 
mother of the first Lord Massereene. "This poor 
church," says Patrick Adair, had [in 1654] "a new 
sunshine of liberty of all ordinances," and the Presby- 
terians flourished in the counties of Down and Antrim 
for five years. They were, however, vexed by the 
existence of the Anabaptists on one side and by that 
of Jeremy Taylor's Episcopal friends on the other, and 
even their own partial historian admits that they were 
divided amongst themselves by "some jealousies and 
animosities." To settle these internal factions and to 
protect themselves against external enemies, the Pres- 



156 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

bytery passed what was called " the Act of Bangor," 
which proved extremely consolidating, and enabled 
them to carry out a detailed policy with great effec- 
tiveness. "Even in the sight and to the angering of 
their adversaries, the old Episcopal party and the 
Anabaptists and other sectaries," the Presbyterians 
succeeded in getting firm hold of the diocese. They 
ruled it, indeed, with a rod of iron, tempered only by 
the determination of Henry Cromwell to prevent all 
overt acts of intolerance. But at the time of Jeremy 
Taylor's arrival in Ireland, the attitude of the Pres- 
byterians to Churchmen had grown as offensive as fear 
of Cromwell would permit it to be. Those friends 
of Taylor's whose names have been recounted were 
prominent leaders of the Cromwellian party, who 
were in favour of religious liberty, and who kept the 
Presbyterians in check. 

But three or four months after Taylor's arrival 
the death of Oliver Cromwell (September 3, 1658) 
altered the whole aspect of affairs. From having en- 
joyed a steady authority, the party of Henry Cromwell 
in Ireland immediately became "staggering and reel- 
ing." The Presbyterians in Down and Antrim lost no 
time in taking advantage of the change, and they 
adopted the double policy of intriguing for the king's 
recall and of making the position of the Episcopalians 
untenable. When, later on, we are confronted with the 
undeniable, and much to be regretted, harshness of 
Taylor as a bishop, it is only fair to remember that the 
year 1659 was made intolerable to him by the enmity 
which he met with from the surrounding ministers. It 
is almost certain that the departure of Henry Cromwell 
from Dublin was the signal of Taylor's dismissal from 



v.] PORTMORE 157 

his lectureship at Lisburn. He withdrew altogether to 
his retreat within the park of Portmore, and even there 
it would seem that he was not safe from the insults of 
the predominant party. He kept close all the winter of 
1658-59, engaged in finishing JDudor Dubitantiivm, which 
he hoped at length to see in the printer's hands, although 
as a matter of fact its publication was again delayed. 
Colonel Hill, the strongest supporter of Episcopacy in 
the county of Down, occasionally entertained him at 
his house in Hillsborough, and this seems to have 
drawn the particular attention of the Presbytery to 
him. A peculiarly busy fanatic, of the name of 
Tandy, who divided his hostile attentions between the 
Anabaptists and the Churchmen, became especially 
offensive. In June 1659 Taylor wrote Lord Conway, 
who was in London, a letter which " almost broke his 
his heart." Tandy had denounced Taylor to the Lord 
Deputy and the council for illegal practices, and par- 
ticularly for having baptized a child with the sign of 
the cross. Taylor was deeply alarmed, and expected 
to be sent to prison. Lord Conway wrote to Colonel 
Hill, entreating him to protect the doctor so far as his 
ability went, and forwarded a sum of money for his legal 
defence. Taylor was in despair ; " I fear my peace in 
Ireland is likely to be short," he wrote to Evelyn, "for 
a Presbyterian and a madman have informed against 
me as a dangerous man to their religion." He hoped 
to be able to escape to England, although he would 
fain stay where he is, "if I can enjoy my quietness 
here." 

The persecution, however, grew more intense, and 
Taylor passed a distressing summer. On the 11th of 
August his calamities culminated in his arrest, at the 



158 JEREMY TAYLOR [chai>. 

instance of Thomas Herbert, who directed Colonel 
Bryan Smith, governor of Carrickfergus, forthwith at 
sight to " cause the body of Dr. Jeremiah Taylor to be 
sent up to Dublin under safe custody, to the end that 
he may make his personal appearance before the said 
Commissioners to answer unto such things as shall be 
objected against him in behalf of the Commonwealth." 
We are told that the agitation of this arrest and the 
subsequent enforced journey to Dublin threw him into 
a serious illness ; but this is perhaps an echo of a later 
imprisonment. Dublin, however, was not the County 
Down ; the zeal of the Presbyterians was not greatly 
appreciated in the capital, and here Taylor found a 
friend who had survived the fall of the Cromwell party, 
Sir Matthew Thomlinson, a leader of the military 
faction, whose attitude to Irish politics was looked 
upon so unfavourably by the English Parliamentarians 
that an effort was now made to impeach him. For 
a brief moment Thomlinson, who was well affected to 
Jeremy Taylor, was one of the most influential persons 
in Ireland. 

Taylor seems not to have met with any harsh 
treatment in Dublin, and he returned to Portmore, 
where he resumed his quiet life. But relations with 
England were disturbed; the postal system was 
entirely dislocated, and he was left in anxiety about 
the condition of affairs. A reassuring letter from 
Evelyn, sent off on the 23rd of July, was not delivered 
at Portmore until the 1st of November. Taylor was 
now, a second time, sent for to Dublin by the Commis- 
sioners, " in the worst of our winter weather," and he 
"found the evil of it so great, that in my going I 
began to be ill," and "in my return, had my illness 



v.] PORTMORE 159 

redoubled and fixed/' so that it was not until February 
1660 that his health was restored. He quite gave up 
all idea of remaining in Ireland, harassed as he was by 
the malevolence of the Presbyterian ministers, and he 
only waited for better weather "by God's permission 
to return to England." It was the darkest hour before 
the dawn. All this has been very slightly touched 
upon by those who have been only too ready to 
emphasise Taylor's subsequent rigour to the Presby- 
terians of his diocese. Without ceasing to regret that 
he did not see his way to treat them, in the hour of his 
authority, with greater indulgence, we must insist on 
pointing out how very offensive they had been to him, 
and to his fellow-churchmen, when Presbyterianism 
seemed to be enjoying a settled supremacy in Ulster. 

When Jeremy Taylor, however, wrote the letter 
which has just been quoted, at the beginning of 
February 1660, the tide was flowing fast towards 
tolerance, for the new Convention, which had been 
called together in Dublin to replace the dissolved Irish 
parliament, was a complex body, in which, although 
the Presbyterians seemed predominant, the prelatical 
party had a great deal to say. As the restoration 
of the Stuarts became more and more certain, the 
ministers protested their fondness for the Eoyal family. 
But the Irish were suspicious, and Patrick Adair 
pathetically complains, " Yea, where a man was sober 
and godly, his loyalty was by the common sort of 
people more suspected." Meanwhile Jeremy Taylor 
was again in great poverty ; if it had not been for a 
gift from Evelyn he could not have paid his debts. 
He was able, however, to pass through Dublin early in 
the spring, and to arrive in London in April. On the 



160 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

24th of that month he affixed his signature to the 
declaration of those leading loyalists who expressed their 
satisfaction with Monk's policy and their confidence 
in his judgment, and who declared for a constitutional 
form of government. Of Taylor's attitude at this 
time, Rust gives an account, which no doubt gives a 
very fair impression of the delirious excitement which 
prevailed in the bosoms of all loyalists and churchmen. 
" By this time the wheel of providence brought about 
the King's happy restoration, and there began a new 
world, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of 
the waters, and out of a confused chaos brought forth 
beauty and order, and all the three nations were 
inspired with a new life, and became drunk with an 
excess of joy. Among the rest, this loyal subject 
[Jeremy Taylor] went over to congratulate the prince 
and people's happiness, and bear a part in the universal 
triumph." 

On his passage through Dublin, Taylor had been 
able to observe the astonishing improvement in the 
prospects of his party, which the mere communication 
with the King at Breda had brought with it. If the 
populace were sympathisers with the Presbytery, men 
of light and leading were numerous on the Episcopal 
side. The stronger bishops, particularly Bramhall and 
Henry Leslie, hastened to Dublin with, what their 
antagonists lacked, a definite plan of campaign. Leslie, 
who, throughout the troublous times had courageously 
stuck to it that he was, by the grace of God and the 
King, still Lord Bishop of Down and Connor, was in 
close communication with Taylor. Meanwhile, the 
Presbyterians felt the lack of commanding personages 
in their democracy. One of the cleverest of them, 



v.] PORTMORE 161 

Patrick Adair, has described the condition of things in 
mournful terms: "The Presbyterians had not men of 
note and quality to be leaders in these affairs." Trans- 
lated from their homes in Ulster, the ministers were 
out of their element in Dublin, whither Adair himself 
resorted to witness the melancholy change. "Our 
grandees," he says, "began to court the few old 
bishops who were in Ireland, and who had then 
repaired to Dublin. They allowed them considerable 
salaries in the meantime, and began to give them their 
titles. . . . Some bishops who, at my arrival there, 
had very hardly access to the Commissioners upon any 
business, no one seeming to own them in the streets, 
and who had been content with the countenance of 
any private person, before I left [within three months 
of his arrival] had become high, and much courted, 
and their titles given them." 

But Jeremy Taylor was now in London, and very 
shortly after the King's arrival, giving his publisher 
only just time to hurry through the press a jubilant • 
preface of welcome to "the most Sacred Majesty of 
Charles II.," he published at length the enormous work 
on which we have seen him engaged at intervals for at 
least twenty years. He had made effort after effort 
to produce it before, but always without success. His 
publisher was shy of so huge an enterprise ; his fellow- 
divines had eyed it with suspicion. That he could not 
issue his great book of cases of conscience had been 
the disappointment of his literary life. But now, as 
he says, "our duty stands upon the sunny side"; any- 
thing published by the most eminent of living divines 
was sure of a sale ; and Royston hesitated no longer. 
Jeremy Taylor, forever adding instances and heaping 



,' 



162 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

up details, had come at last to tlie conclusion that his 
book was finished. He may well have been put out 
of countenance by the mountain of his manuscript. 
On the 5th of October 1659 he closed the last sentence 
of his preface in " my study in Portmore in Killultagh," 
although tradition asserts that the words were written 
in a building on what is now the desolate islet which 
has been described in Lough Beg. He decided on a 
title at last, Ductor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience 
in all Jier general measures. He anticipated for his book 
a universal welcome ; this, or nothing, was to be his 
masterpiece. 

Posterity has refused anything more than respectful 
recognition to the Ductor Dubitantium. Its bulk, its 
want of variety, its utter discord with what we demand 
in the form of theology, have left it to moulder on 
high library shelves. But it has too hurriedly been 
stated that it was a failure from the beginning. 
Considered as an enterprise, Taylor's judgment was 
justified as against the reluctance of Royston. It was 
issued first in two folio volumes, then in one, and, costly 
as it was, it was reprinted at least three times before 
the close of the century. Of the bulk of the Ductar, 
some impression may be formed from the fact that, if 
printed from the same type, it would occupy some 
twelve volumes equivalent to the present monograph. 
This is a surprising amplitude for a treatise on the 
conscience. But it must be recollected that it was 
produced during an age of scruple, although, it is true, 
towards the decline of that age. Taylor intended it, 
too, to be, as far as possible, exhaustive. Moreover 
there were still those alive who recollected the official 
establishment which had been opened at Oxford for 



v.] PORTMORE 163 

the settlement of cases of conscience, and some who 
would have welcomed the re-establishment of what 
scoffers had called u the scruple-shop." 

All through the early part of the seventeenth 
century efforts had been made to compile a definitive 
manual of Anglican casuistry. There had been felt 
I a great scarcity of books of cases of conscience " ; a 
want not supplied by the innumerable expositions 
and lectures of William Perkins, nor even by Joseph 
Hall's Resolutions and Decisions. Taylor speaks of what 
Hooker essayed to do; he does not mention what 
Donne in one generation and Sanderson in the next 
had planned. All had either sketched the work too 
lightly, or had shrunk from its onerous elaboration. 
Taylor attributed all these failures to the lack of that 
psychological knowledge which experience only can 
supply. "The careless and needless neglect of receiv- 
ing private confessions hath been too great a cause of 
our not providing materials apt for so pious and useful 
a ministration." He speaks of "private conferences" 
and of "admonitions and answers given when some 
more pious and religious persons came to confessions," 
as the true preparation for such a manual of casuistical 
theology. Well, perhaps no one else in that troubled 
age had enjoyed exactly the same or anything like the 
same advantages in this direction as Jeremy Taylor 
had enjoyed in his confidential peregrinations. All 
manner of strange scruples, all sophistications and 
subtleties of conscience, all meanderiDgs of souls to 
whom life was "a wood before your doors, and a 
labyrinth within the wood, and locks and bars to every 
door within that labyrinth," had been submitted to 
him in secret by anxious penitents, and for each his 



164 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

lucid and ingenious spirit had devised some sort of 
guidance. 

The result of twenty years of cases noted in a suc- 
cession of pocket-books, — that is the Ductor Dubi- 
tantium ; and it is hopeless to pretend that it offers a 
vivid interest now to a generation which has shelved 
its scruples altogether, or has generously simplified 
them. How can we excite ourselves to-day with a 
discussion as to whether a man who has taken a vow 
to abstain from wine may "nevertheless drink sherbets 
and delicious beverages, strong ale and spirits'"? 
Although " a man is very much better than a beast," 
is not the life of a beast "better than the superfluous 
hair of a man's beard " 1 Common sense decides this 
without casuistical effort. Still more remote from us 
is the inquiry whether "he that buys the body of a 
slave hath right to all the ministries of his soul " % 
A hospitably-minded Christian no longer rushes to his 
parish priest to be told whether it is lawful to help an 
honoured guest to get drunk at his table. These seem 
to us, what the still subtler hair-splittings of the Fathers 
seemed to Taylor, "ridiculous commentaries and useless 
glosses." They do explicit injustice to the intelligence 
and good sense which he rarely fails to display in his 
commentaries, as where he openly declares that a great 
deal that passes for scrupulosity of conscience is no- 
thing but the direct result of fatigue or ill-health. 
His object is really to apply medicine to the morbid 
nerves of his age. He does not encourage useless 
"tremblings"; he is distinctly averse to unnecessary 
rules and the multiplication of unbearable burdens. 
The Ductor Dubitantium is, in theology, very much 
what Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica is in 



v.] PORTMORE 165 

zoology. It is the work of a great modern spirit, 
enlightened far beyond the average of his own day, yet 
bearing about with him, and exhibiting on every page, 
the evidences of the surrounding popular darkness. 

In the course of a work from which — and this is one 
great source of its tedium to-day — the autobiographical 
eiement is severely excluded, we come with pleasure 
on a single paragraph, which gives the general reader 
all that he needs to know of Jeremy Taylor's attitude 
towards his " cases of conscience " : — 

" In hard and intricate questions I take that which is easy 
and intelligible, and concerning which it will be easy to judge 
whether it be right or wrong. In odious things, and matters 
of burden and envy, I take that part which is least, unless 
there be evident reason to the contrary. In favours, I always 
choose the largest sense, when any one is bettered by that 
sense, and no man is the worse. In things and matters 
relating to men, I give those answers that take away scruples, 
and bring peace and a quiet mind. In things relating to God 
I always choose to speak that thing which to Him is most 
honourable. In matters of duty I always choose that which 
is most holy. In doubts I choose what is safest. In pro- 
babilities I prefer that which is the more reasonable, never 
allowing to any one a leave of choosing that which is con- 
fessedly the less reasonable in the whole conjunction of 
circumstances." 

The pity of this lucid and admirably just summary 
of the right temper of priestly sympathy is, that it raises 
the question whether the conscience requires more 
guidance than is, precisely in these sentences, indicated ; 
whether, in short, from the practical point of view, the 
remainder of the vast folio is not a superfluity. At the 
worst it is an entertaining miscellany of stories and 
maxims, which might be read with pleasure to-day, if it 



166 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

were not clogged with such masses of Latin and Greek, 
and if it were not so interminably lengthy. But there is 
another reason, and one too curious to be omitted, why 
the Bucfor Bubitantium is no longer to be recommended 
as a convenient guide for the scrupulous. Jeremy 
Taylor's vast, confidential experience had proved to 
him how paramount a place is taken by what he calls 
" odious things " in the scruples of the sincere. The 
consequence is that the Ductor Bubitantium is crowded 
with considerations which a wise and liberal-minded 
priest might discuss in private conversation with adult 
persons, but which must, one thinks, even in 1660, 
have seemed indiscreet and embarrassing when set 
down in print in a popular manual. 

The saturation of Taylor's memory by the pagan 
classics had given him a certain perduration of mind, 
so that things which he sternly reproved, and most 
sincerely abhorred, were yet no longer outside the 
range of what he was prepared quietly to discuss. He 
no longer discerned what things those are which it 
is better that untrained consciences should not even 
contemplate, nor realised that there are turpitudes 
which demand silence more than exhortation. So 
singularly large a place is taken by " odious things " 
throughout the Bucfar, that it would be disingenuous 
not to face this characteristic, which is partly, of 
course, but not at all entirely, common to the age in 
which Taylor wrote. In all these matters, and in the 
treatment of other scruples of conscience, his absolute 
mental aloofness is very interesting. He had the 
judicial mind in its quintessence, and in practice must 
have been the most imperturbable of confessors. Him, 
at all events, we may without levity admit, no penitent 



y.] PORTMORE 167 

could "shock" out of his decorum. And throughout, 
nevertheless, with his legal air of the tribunal, he 
admits that in all things, within a certain oscillation 
of the rules, each man is a law unto himself, and 
truth itself not rigorously positive, but " like a dove's 
neck or a changeable taffeta." It may be added that 
ii any reader desires to-day — no small adventure — to 
read the Dudor Dubitantium, he may do so with profit 
in the laborious edition brought out in 1851 by a 
namesake of the author, the Rev. Alexander Taylor. 

Charles II. arrived in London on the 29th of May / 
1660, and Taylor was one of those who took part in the 
rapturous reception. Sixteen years had passed since, 
as his father's domestic chaplain, Taylor had seen the 
prince, and we may speculate in vain how the changes 
in his appearance and demeanour struck him. This 
was the moment when all lovers of Jeremy Taylor's 
genius must unite in wishing that he had been en- 
couraged to remain in England, but it is evident that 
Bramhall, who was shortly nominated Archbishop of 
Armagh, and Leslie, who was to be translated from 
Down to Meath, must have represented that the presence 
of Taylor was essential to the wellbeing of the Irish 
Church. Accordingly, on the 6th of August 1660 he , 
was nominated, under the privy seal, to the vacant 
bishopric of Down and Connor, and shortly afterwards, 
on his way back to his see, was, at Ormonde's recom- 
mendation, appointed vice-chancellor of the University 
of Dublin. Although he did not take the oaths for the 
latter office until early in 1661, he lost no time in 
devoting himself to the labour of university reform. 
On arriving in Dublin, he immediately set himself to 
visit Trinity College, and on the 3rd of October 



168 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

presented his first report to Lord Ormonde. He found 
all the internal affairs of the University "in a perfect 
disorder." The Provost was the only surviving relic 
of the whole foundation, and it was necessary to set 
aside all the usual methods of election to fill the vacant 
fellowships. 

He proposed, therefore, that a committee, consisting 
of himself, James Margetson, Archbishop of Dublin, 
as visitor, and the Provost of Trinity, should 
nominate seven senior fellows, three of whom, Dr. 
Sterne, Joshua Cowley, and Patrick Sheridan, we know 
to have been personal friends of Taylor's. Great 
practical difficulties, however, intervened ; Ormonde 
was not willing to resign his own prerogative of 
nomination, and it was not until December that "the 
college was in its former state and possibility of 
proceeding according to the elections." Just before 
Christmas, Taylor laments that "we have no public 
statutes relating to an university, no established forms 
of collating degrees, no public lecturers, no schools, no 
Eegius professor of Divinity, and scarce any ensignes 
academical." But gradually all these things were set 
on foot, and it was not until he had seen "the 
university rising to its full state and splendour " that 
he ventured to quit Dublin and proceed to his 
northern diocese. In his Life of Ormonde, Carte dwells 
on Taylor's prodigious industry in collecting, arranging, 
revising, and completing the body of statutes which 
Bedell had left in confusion. But later writers have 
hardly done justice to the extraordinary merit of 
Taylor's labours in reconstituting the ancient centre of 
Protestant learning in Ireland, when it had become a 
mere "heap of men and boys, but no body of a college, 



v.] PORTMORE 169 

no one member, either fellow or scholar, having any 
legal title to his place." He carried out this great 
work, too, in the midst of distracting and humiliating 
interruptions of a most painful kind, for his nomina- 
tion to the see of Down and Connor had been received 
with a storm of protest in the Ulster presbyteries. 
It, should not be forgotten by us, what is doubtless 
well remembered in Trinity College, that Jeremy 
Taylor was the regenerating force which drew to 
one common system the scattered elements of Irish 
learning. 

Late in the summer of 1660 Koyston published 
another work of considerable importance by Jeremy 
Taylor, The Worthy Communicant. This was a treatise of 
a wholly uncontroversial character, composed in a spirit 
of serenity to which the author's conditions had long 
made him a stranger. It has been hastily described as 
written to instruct the newly victorious Royalists in 
their duty to God. But careful examination will show 
that this is a mistake. Near the end of The Worthy 
Communicant we find the author speaking of the age in 
which he writes, as one where piety has suffered ship- 
wreck, where all discipline has been lost in the storm, 
and where good manners have been thrown overboard. 
1 'The best remedy in the world that yet remains and 
is in use amongst the most pious sons and daughters of 
the church, is that they should conduct their repent- 
ance by the continual advices and ministry of a 
spiritual guide." These words evidently point to the 
time, from 1657 to 1659, when Jeremy Taylor was 
acting as a secret pastor, in the darkest hour, and 
among those who had still no hope of ecclesiastical 
restoration. 



170 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

The advent of Charles II., however, offered him an 
opportunity to bring forth his MS. and publish it. It 
is at any time a fatherly task for a divine to sum up 
the duties of those who gather to receive the Holy 
Communion. Still, it is impossible not to see that 
something of the appropriateness of this particular 
treatise had passed away as soon as the embargo upon 
public Anglican worship had been removed. The 
mystery, the air of ghostly comfort to a beleaguered 
camp of the faithful, the unction of adversity, — these 
are lost when all is prosperity and sunshine ; and the 
attitude of affliction seems misdirected when the long- 
persecuted remnant are in the very act of being 
rewarded with posts of dignity and emolument. 
Hence, perhaps, although this is in some respects 
one of Taylor's least-contestable works, it was never 
a great popular favourite. The Worthy Communicant 
was dedicated to the Princess Mary of Orange, the 
King's sister. This lady, who had been left a widow 
at nineteen, had developed a strong character. A con- 
vinced Protestant in spite of all the pressure towards 
Rome brought to bear upon her by her mother, Queen 
Henrietta Maria, she had become a particular patron of 
English divinity. Her court in Holland " hath been 
in all these late days of sorrow a sanctuary to the 
afflicted, a chapel for the religious," and it was hoped 
that her arrival in England would be of good omen for 
the English Church. 

Princess Mary of Orange was a great admirer of 
Taylor's genius. She "read and used divers of my 
books," he says. He had not seen her since she was a 
child of twelve, and he was disappointed of resuming 
an acquaintance which would now have been of great 



v.] PORTMORE 171 

value to him. The Princess delayed her coming, and 
before she arrived, on the 30th of September, Taylor's 
duties had called him back to Ireland. Her visit to 
England was ill-starred in the highest degree '; she was 
displeased with many things, her health failed, and on 
the 24th of December she died, only twenty-nine years 
of age, leaving behind her, besides a reputation for 
piety and for something of the family obstinacy, a 
child who was destined to be King William III. It is 
almost certain that if the Princess had remained at the 
court of Whitehall, she would have insisted on securing 
for Jeremy Taylor promotion to one of the great 
English sees for which his loyalty, his eloquence, and 
his unrivalled reputation so manifestly designed him. 

Towards the close of The Worthy Communicant Jeremy 
Taylor uses words which accurately sum up the scope 
of that book. "Every worthy communicant," he says, 
u must prepare himself by a holy life, by mortification 
of all his sins, by the acquisition of all Christian graces. 
And this is not the work of a day, or a week ; but by how 
much the more these things are done, by so much the 
better are we prepared." The treatise is non-conten- 
tious ; its tone is gentle and persuasive. It is a dis- 
course of the nature and uses of the Lord's Supper, 
" the blessings and fruits of the Sacrament," and of how 
we must initiate ourselves into them. It is, in short, 
a manual of conduct in these solemn circumstances ; it 
contains many wise and beautiful reflections, might be 
shredded into an anthology of maxims, and is inter- 
spersed, after Jeremy Taylor's favourite fashion, with 
exquisitely fervent prayers. "The fierce saying of a 
few warm and holy words is not a sufficient preparation 
to these sacred mysteries," and we are, throughout, in 



172 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

the presence of one who is deeply solicitous for the 
persistent holiness of the souls to whom he is the guide. 
Ever-recurring are Taylor's extreme solicitude about 
the importance of vital repentance, and about the 
necessity of keeping the conscience sensitive and sound. 

From a literary point of view, The Worthy Communi- 
cant exhibits the natural, we may almost say the 
physical, progress of its author's mind. It is marked 
by strength and warmth of expression, and by an 
absence of all oddity of verbiage. The style is per- 
fectly pure and simple, clarified by maturity and 
experience. At the same time the rich perfume of the 
Golden Grove period seems to have evaporated. The 
images taken from external nature have almost dis- 
appeared. The apologues are still beautifully told, but 
without audacities of phrase ; they are told in a new 
way, which leans towards the coming Eighteenth 
Century. Many pages here, in their lucidity, without 
colour or picturesqueness, might almost be the writing 
of Tillotson, so reasonable and succinct are their con- 
structions. So that we see, in this book, the genius 
of Jeremy Taylor unconsciously responding to the 
appeal of European taste, and adapting its step to the 
fashion of the times. But already how far are we from 
the splendour of the great period, while in exchange 
for correctness and sobriety of style we have parted 
with a charm that now never can return. This 
estimable book consoles us for the fact that events now 
interrupted and presently closed the life of Taylor as 
a man of letters, since it shows us that what we love 
best in his writing, its rapturous mounting note, had 
departed from it for ever. 

Jeremy Taylor was not left under any illusion as to 



v.] PORTMORE 173 

his welcome in County Down. A preliminary visit to 
his intended diocese filled him with alarm and dis- 
appointment. In the face of impending events, his 
first impressions, as reported to Ormonde in a letter 
of December 19, 1660, deserve our careful notice : — 

" His sacred Majesty and your Excellence intended to 
prefer me, in giving me the bishopric of Down. But, — 
besides that I find it very much short of what it was repre- 
sented to me, and much of the rents litigious and uncertain, 
of which I will not complain, — I perceive myself thrown into 
a place of torment. The country would quickly be very well, 
if the Scotch ministers were away, at least some of the prime 
incendiaries. All the nobility and gentry, one only [Lord 
Massereene] excepted, are very right, but the ministers are 
implacable. They have for these four months past solemnly 
agreed, and very lately renewed their resolution, of preaching 
vigorously and constantly against episcopacy and liturgy. . . . 
They talk of resisting unto blood, and stir up the people to 
sedition. . . . They have now gone about to asperse me as an 
Arminian, and a Socinian, and a Papist, — or at least half a 
Papist, . . . and I am not at all guilty, as having no other 
religion but that of the Church of England, for which I have 
suffered the persecution of eighteen years. . . . But yet they 
have lately bought my books, and appointed a committee of 
Scotch spiders to see if they can gather or make poison out of 
them, and have drawn some little thing, I know not what, into 
a paper, and intend to petition to his Majesty that I may not 
be their bishop." 

It is amusing to see an amiable inconsistency 
between Taylor's anger at "Scotch spiders" buying 
his books, and his advice, given a few days later, 
to a fellow of Trinity of the name of Graham, 
who asked for a list of the best existing works on 
practical theology, perhaps for the College Library. 
In the latter case, Taylor cheerfully supplied a brief 



174 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

catalogue of publications which "he that would 
improve in the doctrine of the Church of England" 
must "be very perfect in every part of"; and there 
is scarcely a book or a pamphlet which Taylor had 
ever printed which does not appear somewhere or 
other on this list. Meanwhile his complaint to Ormonde 
was perhaps a little more tragical than the circumstances 
demanded, although these were awkward enough. He 
went down from Dublin to preach every Sunday some- 
where or other in his future diocese, and had already 
made a good impression upon the affections of "the 
gentry and the better sort of the people." Among the 
non-Presbyterian part of the population he met with 
universal esteem. Unhappily, of course, it was pre- 
cisely the Presbyterians who were vastly in the majority, 
and Jeremy Taylor was forced to the conclusion that 
their ministers, at least, were implacable. His report 
of their rejection of his advances is not to their credit. 
The bishop wrote : — 

" They threaten to murder ine. They use all the arts they 
can to disgrace me, and to take the people's hearts from me, 
and to make my life uncomfortable and useless to the service 
of his Majesty and the Church. ... It were better for me to 
be a poor curate in a village church than a bishop over such 
intolerable persons ; and I will petition your Excellence to 
give me some parsonage in Minister, that I may end my days 
in peace, rather than abide here, unless I may be enabled with 
comfort to contest against such violent persons. . . . My 
charge hath in it more trouble than all the dioceses in his 
Majesty's dominions put together." 

He was quite sincere in wishing to withdraw from 
Down and Connor. He begged Ormonde to let him 
come back to Dublin and devote himself entirely " to 



v.] PORTMOKE 175 

the service and resettling of the University," which 
still required great care and labour. When the govern- 
ment merely smiled, and said that he must stay in 
Ulster and do his best, Taylor replied that in that case 
he must be assisted by the secular arm. Ormonde 
th^n signified that the Bishop would receive full 
support in doing his duty, and that he must not take 
such a despairing view. If the Scotch spiders were 
sulky, he must handle a long broom and sweep them 
out of their webs. Accordingly, he took what heart 
he could, but he had no peace or happiness all the 
time that he was bishop in Down; and there can 
be no question that the constant friction with his 
Presbyterian neighbours, and those " insufferable dis- 
couragements " of which he never ceased to complain, 
paralysed his usefulness and shortened his life. 

The ecclesiastical arrangements for the filling of the 
Irish sees were not finally completed until the 18th of 
January 1661, when two archbishops and ten bishops 
were instituted in St. Patrick's Cathedral. John 
Bramhall, now Archbishop of Armagh, in succession 
to Ussher, who had died five years before, presided 
at the consecration, and Jeremy Taylor preached the 
sermon. Old Henry Leslie, who was in his eighty- 
first year, was transferred from Down and Connor 
to Meath, and Jeremy Taylor took his place. Robert 
Leslie, who "was nothing short of his father in 
cruelty to Nonconformists, but rather exceeded him," 
went to Dromore. It was in these contiguous Ulster 
dioceses that the Presbyterians were strongest, and 
" there were not three such bishops in Ireland " 
for the stringency of their Episcopalianism. It is 
melancholy to have to record that even Bramhall, 



176 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

who was called "the Irish Laud," did not contrive to 
vex the souls of the Presbyterian ministers so much 
as did the author of the Liberty of Prophesying. Taylor 
was but carrying out, however, the theories of his 
predecessor, Henry Leslie, who had compared the 
Independents and the Presbyterians to the thieves 
between whom our Lord was crucified. 

Jeremy Taylor's headquarters when he first took up 
the labours of his diocese was Hillsborough, where he 
is believed to have occupied rooms, with his family, in 
" the noble large house," fitted up as a regular fortress, 
which had been built and manned by Colonel Arthur 
Hill. There is no other place in Ireland where the 
impression of Taylor's daily life can be reconstructed 
with so great a measure of success as it can at Hills- 
borough. The castle of the Hills had been built on 
the abrupt eminence of Crumlin, by Colonel Hill 
during the reign of Charles I., as an outpost against 
the rebels of the west. It was accidentally burned 
down, in main part, early in the eighteenth century, 
and the family then removed to the great house, a 
little to the west, which is still the residence of the 
Marquis of Downshire. But enough is left of the old 
fortress to permit us to restore the general plan of 
its construction. A little ecclesiastical building, ruined 
but still largely intact, on the ring of wall, was doubt- 
less the chapel in which Jeremy Taylor officiated. 
To this day the traces of buildings around the court- 
yard are brought to light whenever the spade is used, 
and before any town existed the whole life of the 
place was included within their circle. 

The pretty and neat little borough town, very 
English in character, which now struggles up the steep 



v.] PORTMORE 177 

rock from the north, cannot have existed in the seven- 
teenth century; it dates from about 1750. But there 
may have been a rude village lower down, where, at 
the bridge, there stood a small parish church when 
Taylor first came to Hillsborough. This was falling 
iiiuo ruins, and in 1662 the Bishop and Colonel Hill 
constructed, a few yards from the old castle and almost 
within its precincts, a spacious, well-contrived church, 
dedicated to St. Malachy, in the form of a cross, on 
the very brow of the hill. This, which was called 
Jeremy Taylor's church, was rebuilt and much enlarged, 
after a fire, in the eighteenth century, and all that 
remains of it is the base of one of the outer walls built 
into the present edifice. 

It has quite recently (1903) been discovered by Canon 
Lett of Loughbrickland, the distinguished antiquary, 
that Homra House, a little solitary mansion two miles 
to the west of Hillsborough, just off the road to Comber, 
belonged to Jeremy Taylor, and that in the later part 
of his life the prelate often resided there. He is also 
said to have occupied, and even to have built, a house 
in Castle Street, Lisburn, opposite the door of the 
church which then served as cathedral to the united 
dioceses. It was, however, a very short ride from 
Hillsborough to Lisburn, and it is most reasonable to 
suppose that the bishop mainly resided, at all events 
at first, in the castle at Hillsborough, where he was 
safer than anywhere else in his diocese from the enmity 
of his Presbyterian ministers, and from their petty 
annoyances. In Lisburn, although its cathedral, with 
a tower and an octagonal spire, may vaguely remain 
the same, there is little else to recall the seventeenth 
century. That town was destroyed by fire early in the 
M 



178 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

nineteenth, and has scarcely an old house in it. The 
traveller, however, who follows the undulating road 
between Lisburn and Hillsborough, is on a track which 
must have been incessantly traversed by the bishop, 
as he rode from his castle to his cathedral church \ and 
the general aspect of the brisk, rolling landscape has 
probably changed but little in two centuries and a half. 
It has, however, changed in one particular which must 
not be forgotten. As Lord Londonderry said in a 
recent speech, the county of Down, which is now the 
richest in Ireland, was, at the Restoration, perhaps the 
poorest. 

It was in a spirit grievously exasperated against the 
rebellious shepherds of his flock that, in March 1661, 
Jeremy Taylor made his first visitation. He sent before 
him into Antrim and Down a proclamation from the 
Dublin courts of justice, discharging all Presbyterian 
meetings. The terrified ministers, at his approach, 
hurriedly met in synod at Ballymena. A troop of horse 
was sent by Taylor's friend, Sir George Rawdon, to 
disperse them, but they had concluded their meeting 
before the troopers arrived. They forwarded a deputa- 
tion of their body to Dublin to plead their cause before 
Lord Ormonde. Jeremy Taylor immediately left for the 
north, having received an assurance that no encourage- 
ment would be given to the ministers. He waited at 
his apartments in Hillsborough until they returned 
home, and then summoned them all to meet him at 
Lisburn. Meanwhile, at this peculiar juncture, their 
principal patron, Lady Clotworthy, died, and at her 
funeral, which took place at Belfast the day before 
that which the bisnop had fixed for the visitation, 
the ministers took counsel together. Then and there 



V.] PORTMORE 179 

they sent three of their number to Hillsborough, to 
tell Jeremy Taylor that they did not acknowledge his 
Episcopal jurisdiction, and should not appear next day 
in answer to his summons. 

It does not seem that he treated the representative 
ministers, for this act of extreme insubordination, 
with severity. He told them that if they would define 
their position on paper, he would discuss it with them. 
He then asked them whether they considered the 
Presbyterian form of government exclusively the right 
one, and dejure divino. They said at once that they 
did. It is not easy to see what else they could say, 
but on the other hand it made compromise impossible. 
The bishop was left in the dilemma that he must 
either subdue the ministers, or resign his see. This 
he pointed out to them, and added "that there needed 
no further discourse of the matter of accommodation," 
if they held to their unyielding position. They pro- 
fessed that they were willing to discuss their views in 
public at the visitation, but the bishop naturally felt 
that it was impossible to allow that. Taylor's patience 
seems to have broken down, and he sharply instructed 
them that "if they should make profession contrary 
to law at the visitation, they would smart for it." 
Then, speaking more gently, he advised them, as 
a friend, not to attempt to justify their position 
by argument. But in the subsequent conversation, 
much bad blood was stirred on both sides, and we 
do not recognise our gentle Taylor, although we have 
had experience of his obstinacy, when he told his 
visitors, who hesitated about the Oath of Supremacy, 
that they " were the greatest enemies to monarchy, and 
most disobedient to kings, which he instanced in the 



180 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

case of the Assembly of Scotland, and in Calvin, Knox, 
and Buchanan." He compared them with the Jesuits, 
and they returned, greatly troubled at their reception, 
to their brethren, who had meanwhile collected at 
Lisburn, but who now, on hearing the report of their 
friends, dispersed to their parishes. 

When Taylor arrived at Lisburn next day, and 
found that only two of his entire clergy had responded 
to his summons, he was very angry. We must admit 
that he had cause for his vexation. Those who have 
blamed him have hardly, it seems to me, taken into 
due consideration the humiliating impasse in which the 
rigidity of his opponents placed him. They would 
neither go to him nor leave him alone. He had 
hardly retired to his house in Hillsborough when 
another deputation of ministers waited upon him. 
He asked them why they had treated him with so 
much contempt by not coming to his visitation. They 
replied "it was the awe of God and conscience that 
made them not appear." Seeing that he could obtain 
no concession of any kind from the deputation, he 
dismissed them ; but he called several of them to him 
in private, and spoke to them, as they admitted, with 
the greatest kindness and indulgence. But, says 
Patrick Adair, grimly, " he obtained not his purpose," 
and they repaired to their respective congregations in 
a state of open rebellion. The plan of the ministers 
can easily be comprehended ; they aimed at making the 
diocese of Down and Connor one which it was impossible 
for a bishop of the Church of England to hold. They 
thought that by acting in unison, and by refusing to 
recognise Jeremy Taylor's authority in any way, and 
by hinting broadly about "resisting unto blood," they 



v.] PORTMORE 181 

would so distress and intimidate the bishop that he 
would retire, and leave Ulster to the undisputed sway 
of the Presbytery. They had seen that he was a gentle, 
sensitive, and kind-hearted man, and they thought that 
they could break down his nerves. 

But the Presbyterian ministers reckoned without a 
quality in Jeremy Taylor's character, to which we have 
several times referred, namely, his obstinacy. Timid 
and tractable as he was, there was easily reached a 
point in controversy with him where he suddenly 
refused to yield a step further. Before his visitation 
at Lisburn, and at the mere thought of having to 
face the "dour" ministers, he had passed through an 
agony of trepidation. But when once their will had 
clashed with his, he recovered his moral equilibrium. 
If we look at the events, not in a party spirit, with 
a leaning to either side in religion or politics, but as 
at a human spectacle, I know not how we can refuse 
our admiration to Jeremy Taylor when he now turns, 
and, standing almost alone, a stranger and an English- 
man in this fanatical diocese, defies the whole body of 
his unscrupulous foes. He saw that the moment for 
weakness was past. The Presbyterian ministers had 
openly risen in revolt against him, and it was neces- 
sary to choose between crushing them and being 
crushed by them. If he chose the latter, he betrayed 
the Church and the King, his own principles, the 
populations among whom he had been sent as a shep- 
herd. He did not hesitate a moment; he imme- 
diately declared thirty-six parishes vacant, and filled 
these incumbencies with clergy whom he invited out 
from England. What with these, and with the curates 
who accompanied them, Taylor brought over quite a 



182 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

large ecclesiastical colony, and one of these emigrants, 
the excellent George Eust, he appointed Dean of 
Connor. The work of turning out the Presbyterian 
ministers, who struggled to retain their parsonages 
"till it became physically impossible for them to 
continue," of installing and protecting the new clergy, 
of conciliating the congregations, of exhorting and 
cheering and rebuking his flock in all corners of the 
diocese, of deciding cases where, as at Killead and 
Antrim, the ministers could safely be allowed a six 
months' grace, — all this occupied Jeremy Taylor 
through the stormy year 1661. Throughout it was 
a painful business, involving bitterness and exaspera- 
tion ; but all the evidence, and it is mainly on the 
Presbyterian side, goes to prove that the bishop 
carried out his distasteful duty with firmness and 
courage, and, superficially at least, with not a little 
success. The diocese, at all events, became quiet, 
and the Episcopalian form of worship established. 

Taylor often lost hope, however, and he was never 
happy in County Down. At the end of March 1661, 
when he had resided there only a couple of months, 
he begged that if the aged Henry Leslie should die, he 
might be translated to the diocese of Meath, which 
would be much more convenient for his duties in 
Dublin, since he was now not merely vice-chancellor 
of the University, but a member of the Irish Privy 
Council. He wrote to Ormonde: "Here I am per- 
petually contending with the worst of the Scotch 
ministers. I have a most uncomfortable employment, 
but, I bless God, I have broken their knot, I have over- 
come the biggest difficulty, and made the charge easy 
for my successor." To Taylor's extreme disappoint- 



v.] PORTMORE 183 

merit, when Leslie died, on the 9th of April 1661, Henry 
Jones, the veteran bishop of Clogher, was appointed to 
the vacant diocese, and it was again indicated to Taylor 
that he must stay where he was. Doubtless he felt that 
¥• was unreasonable to take his hand from the plough 
so soon, for we hear no more complaint from him for 
some years. Meanwhile he laboured in the thorny 
field, and in such a manner that Rust, speaking to 
those who had been most closely associated with him, 
could say "with what care and faithfulness he dis- 
charged his office, we are all his witnesses." 



CHAPTER VI 



(1661-1667) 

Jeremy Taylor is often described as "Lord-Bishop 
of Down, Connor, and Dromore," and this is even the 
style which his editor and biographer, Heber, gives 
him on the title-page of the Whole Works. He seems 
to have been, however, at no time Bishop of Dromore, 
although, after the early months of 1661, that diocese 
became a very important centre of his activities. 
Dromore was a bishopric founded by St. Colman in the 
sixth century, but its independent existence in post- 
Reformation days began when James I. severed it 
from the diocese of Down, in which it had been 
merged. It was at first a small cluster of parishes in 
the western part of the county, and contained, at the 
Restoration, only five incumbencies, together with 
several "dignities of the church," which made a great 
strain upon its slender revenues. The rebellion of 
1641 had utterly ruined it. Buckworth, the bishop, had 
just completed, at great expense, a palace close to the 
cathedral, and this, with every building in the town, 
was burned by the Tories. When Jeremy Taylor 
arrived at Hillsborough, and rode over to Dromore, 
which is only four English miles to the south of that 



chap, vi.] DROMORE 185 

fastness, he found a poor cluster of huts beginning to 
struggle up the hill from the river Lagan, but no attempt 
made to restore the charred ruins of the cathedral. 

The diocese of Dromore was practically bankrupt, 
ard Taylor received a deputation from the neighbour- 
ing nobility and gentry, proposing that it should be 
merged once more in Down and Connor. It was, as 
he told Ormonde, " not of extent or charge enough for a 
bishop," and on the 28th of March 1661, when Henry 
Leslie lay a-dying, Taylor, as we have seen, applied to 
the government that he should be translated to Meath, 
and that the united northern diocese should be resigned 
to Eobert Leslie, who would then be bishop, not merely 
of Dromore, but of Down and Connor as well. It is 
unfortunate that this arrangement was not carried 
out, for in Meath Taylor would not only have been 
placed in the midst of a friendly population, but he 
would have been close to Dublin and to his valuable 
work at Trinity College. Ormonde, however, would 
not hear of it, but Eobert Leslie was translated to 
Eaphoe, and on the 30th of April Taylor was appointed 
by royal letter "administrator" of the diocese of 
Dromore. The plan was, by temporarily suspending 
the election of a bishop to that see, to give it a sort of 
minority, during which it could recover its solvency. 
This seems to have been fairly acceptable to Jeremy 
Taylor, who received, not indeed an Episcopal salary, 
but considerable fees for his administration, and 
Dromore had no bishop until, in 1667, George Eust 
was appointed. The writ under the privy seal sets 
forth that the stewardship was given to Taylor "on 
account of his virtue, wisdom, and industry." He 
seems to have administered the revenues of the see 



186 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

with unusual dexterity, and to have placed Dromore on 
a prosperous footing. 

One of the first things he did was to raise a cathedral 
on the site of the church which the rebels had destroyed. 
He built a small and decent edifice, not constructed in 
the form of a cross, but consisting of a nave with a 
choir which he added at his own expense. It is to be 
regretted that Dromore, with which Jeremy Taylor 
was so closely identified, now offers the visitor very 
little indeed which can be connected with him. The 
small grey town seems to contain not a single house 
which is not long subsequent to Taylor's death. The 
two-arched bridge over the river may be one of his 
constructions. The palace, now (1903) unoccupied, 
on the hill to the north-west of the station, is quite 
modern ; probably the ruined palace was not rebuilt 
in Jeremy Taylor's time. Even the cathedral, re- 
constructed rather than restored, is most disappoint- 
ing, and a certain amount of basal masonry is all 
that has survived of the church which he built in 
1661. We shall speak later on of such relics of 
Taylor as the present cathedral contains. It would 
be useless to search for any traces of his residence 
in Dromore, since it is certain that he administered 
the little diocese from his apartments in Hillsborough 
Castle. 

We hear extremely little of Jeremy Taylor's family 
life in Ireland. His son Edward, perhaps his only 
son by his wife Joanna, was buried at Lisburn on 
the 10th of March 1661; he could not have been 
more than five years old at the time. There is 
evidence that through the year 1661 Taylor was 
making what proved a hopeless struggle to keep up 



vi.] DROMORE 187 

his intimacy with his old English friends. It is a 
very pathetic fact that after this date their names 
disappear from his correspondence. The distance 
between Ulster and London was great, and methods of 
communication were primitive and slow. The new 
conditions introduced into English life by the Restora- 
tion gave every one a great deal to think about ; leisure 
was restricted, and business vastly increased. When 
Jeremy Taylor went over to London to welcome 
Charles II., he had renewed his friendship with his 
old patron, Lord Hatton of Kirby, and many memories 
had been awakened in his bosom. When he returned to 
Ireland he hoped that Lord Hatton, although time and 
misfortune had greatly changed him, would continue 
their former correspondence, but the peer had other 
matters on his mind. Taylor tried to fancy that his 
own importunate letters had " some way or other mis- 
carried," but Lord Hatton was obstinately mute. " If 
I might have leave, and knew how, whither, and in 
what circumstances to address my letters to your 
Lordship, so that they might come readily to your 
hand," the bishop wrote on the 23rd of November, "I 
would write often, for though I be a useless person, 
yet nobody loves and honours my dear Lord Hatton 
so much as I do " ; but Ireland was a long way off, and 
he was not encouraged to persevere. 

Nor was his experience any better with a dearer and 
a better friend, Evelyn, to whom Jeremy Taylor wrote 
in the course of the same week. " I pray you let me 
hear from you as often as you can, for you will very 
much oblige me if you will continue to love me still." 
He confesses " I am so full of public concerns and the 
troubles of business in my diocese, that I cannot yet 



188 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

have leisure to think of much of my old delightful 
employment " of writing letters to Evelyn. But " I 
hope I have brought my affairs almost to a consis- 
tence," and then, surely, the friends may begin again 
on the former pleasant footing of mutual correspon- 
dence and intimacy. Evelyn sends him some printed 
tracts, but no more letters, and he too drops noiselessly 
out of the affectionate bishop's life. It is the same 
with "worthy Mr. Thurland," although Taylor tries 
to excite him by the transmission of "my love and 
dear regards." He had to be content with new faces 
and the Irish intimacies ; a curtain fell between 
England and his home-sickness. It was not that the 
hearts there had grown cold to him; but he was as 
distant from their interests then, as he would be from 
ours to-day in Madagascar or the Falkland Islands, and 
he had to be content, like exiles all the world over, 
with the conviction that his friends would still love 
him — if they could only recollect him. 

Jeremy Taylor was now recognised as by far the finest 
orator in Ireland, and was indispensable upon great occa- 
sions. For his sermon, preached at the opening of 
Parliament on the 8th of May 1661, he received the 
thanks of both Houses, and its publication was ordered. 
The preacher hesitated to obey; but when it was 
represented to him that what he had so brilliantly 
said would otherwise fade from the memory of 
those who listened to it, he replied, " I would not 
shed that chalice which my own hands have newly 
filled with waters issuing from the fountains of 
salvation," and consented. In the preface to this 
sermon he complains that his " eyes are almost grown 
old with seeing the horrid mischiefs which come from 



vi.] DKOMORE 189 

rebellion and disobedience." But so far as bowing the 
head goes, he is determined to be firm. He will not 
be one of those weak brethren " who plead for tolera- 
tion and compliance," and he lets it be known, in the 
clearest possible tones, that he means to impress the 
law against the Presbyterian "wild asses in the 
wilderness." His sermon at the opening of Parliament 
is one of his cleverest and most trenchant minor 
writings, admirably colloquial, and even, at times, 
humorous. The line of argument is that there can be 
no happiness and no prosperity for the troubles of 
Ireland, unless she is docile. It is the duty of 
Parliament to enforce docility. "God hath put a 
royal mantle, and fastened it with a golden clasp, 
upon the shoulder of the King; and He hath given I 
you the judge's robe ; the King holds the sceptre, and 
he hath now permitted you to touch the golden ball." 
He promises that the bishops will be firm in doctrine, 
if the Houses will be equally firm in law, and together 
they shall proceed to the salvation of Ireland. Above 
all things, he deprecates "a pitiful, a disheartened, a 
discouraged clergy, that waters the ground with a 
waterpot, here and there a little." The sermon is a 
very strong document, which must have encouraged 
the government greatly in its task. We have only to 
read it to comprehend the sensation which it produced 
and the enthusiasm which it awakened. It marks the 
moment of Jeremy Taylor's highest complacency about 
his work in Ulster, when he was flushed with his 
original triumph, and had not experienced the reaction. 
Another publication of 1661 was the Via Intelli- 
gentice, an expansion of an address first delivered to 
the University of Dublin, and afterwards, in a modified 



190 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

form, to the clergy of Taylor's diocese during a 
metropolitan visitation -which the Archbishop of 
Armagh, the aged John Bramhall, made in the summer 
of 1661. Taylor had now collected his imported 
clergy from England, and they rallied about him and 
about the Primate in a highly gratifying manner. 
There was, we are told, "a clergy-show," and after it a 
banquet was given by Taylor, probably at Hills- 
borough, in honour of Bramhall, and the party is 
described as an extremely successful one. The newly 
appointed incumbents learned to know one another, 
and to see their bishop in the light of an assiduous 
and generous host. They might also admire, not 
without a touch of awe, the "stupendous parts, and 
mighty diligence, and unusual zeal " of the not a little 
formidable Primate, who was fighting still, "only 
mortality was too hard for him," and years beginning 
to tell upon the fierceness of his energies. Before 
the "excellent dinner" was served, Jeremy Taylor 
preached to the assembled Primate and clergy, and 
all the gentry that had come to his table, a sermon 
which he presently published and distributed. 

If 1661 was a very full year in the history of 
Jeremy Taylor, 1662 is marked only by anecdotes. 
As we have already seen, he was inclined to a moderate 
credulity about the spirit-world. He has been un- 
justly accused of believing grossly in ghosts ; it would 
be more just to say that he was in favour of psychical 
research. He was now thrown into the midst of a 
very superstitious population, and he was by no means 
helpless, though vividly curious, in presence of their 
tales of wonder. Late on the night of Michaelmas 
1662, a porter called Francis Taverner, who had been 



vi.] DROMORE 191 

at Hillsborough, was riding to his house near Belfast, 
when he came to the Drum bridge, which crosses the 
Lagan at Drumbeg. He was "a lusty proper stout 
fellow," about twenty-five years of age. At the foot 
of the bridge his horse stopped suddenly; Taverner 
dismounted, urged the beast forward, and as he started 
again, was aware of two shadowy horsemen who rode 
beside him, like the great Twin Brethren by the shore 
of Lake Eegillus. At the same moment a third man, 
in a white coat, was at his elbow, and, turning, 
Taverner perceived that this resembled one James 
Haddock, who had died five years before. Taverner 
asked the apparition who in the name of God he was. 
Haddock told his name, and bade him not be afraid, 
reminding him of a trivial circumstance, how Taverner 
had brought some nuts to Haddock and to the two 
friends who were now noiselessly riding on before 
them. A brief conversation brought the party to four 
cross roads, where the path from Dunmurray to 
Lismoyne crosses the Belfast road. Here the ghost 
desired the young man to turn aside with him, but 
Taverner would not, and, galloping on, left him there. 
Whereupon, " there arose a great wind, and withal he 
heard very hideous screeches and noises, to his amaze- 
ment." But presently morning broke, the cocks crew, 
and, slipping off his horse, Taverner knelt in prayer to 
God, and so came safely to Belfast. 

Next night, as he sat by the fire with his wife, the 
ghost of Haddock appeared to him again, and sent a 
vague message about a will and a lease to a certain 
widow, Eleanor Welsh, at Malone, a hamlet close by, 
where Taverner's family lived. This message would 
have upset the whole neighbourhood, and Taverner 



192 JEREMY TAYLOR [.chap. 

could not bring himself to give it. Night after night 
the ghost appeared, more and more importunate and 
angry, now when the porter was sitting at the hearth, 
now when he was in bed. It was never visible to 
Mrs. Taverner, although she was a terrified witness of 
her husband's agitation. For a whole month James 
Haddock, in a white coat, haunted the unfortunate 
young man, who, to escape from the visitation, left 
his home in the hills, and took refuge with a shoe- 
maker in Belfast ; but all in vain. The story gradually 
filled the whole country-side, and reached the bishop, 
who was holding his court in Dromore. 

Thomas Alcock, Jeremy Taylor's secretary, who 
has preserved the story, was instructed to send for 
Taverner, as the bishop was extremely interested in 
what he called "this strange scene of Providence." 
He held a judicial inquiry at Dromore, and cross- 
examined, not Taverner only, but various other 
witnesses who were collected for the purpose. The 
young porter's evidence was not shaken, and Taylor 
came to the conclusion that this was a genuine instance 
of the apparition of the souls of the dead. Lady 
Conway, a learned blue-stocking whose headaches 
were among the most celebrated indispositions of that 
day, and who affected a universal intellectual curiosity, 
asked to have the case retried for her benefit at Hills- 
borough, which Taylor, taking Taverner and all the 
witnesses over from Dromore, actually did before a 
fashionable company. The bishop then supplied 
Taverner with a set of questions, which he was to 
put to the ghost, if it appeared again ; and at night 
sent him off to Lisburn, where he was put up in Lord 
Conway's house. There Taverner and his brother were 



vi.] DROMORE 193 

in the courtyard, when the former saw the spectre in 
its white coat come over the wall to them. Taverner 
plucked up courage and asked his set of questions, but 
the ghost "gave him no answer, but crawled on his 
hands and feet over the wall again, and so vanished 
in white, with a most melodious harmony." And that 
was the close of the incident. But that it was a true 
story of a real ghost, " all wise and good men did 
believe, especially the bishop, and Dr. Rust, the Dean 
of Connor." 

"We possess the questions which Jeremy Taylor 
proposed . to the ghost, and they are of a nature to 
suggest that in his judgment it might be a spirit of 
evil masquerading in Haddock's shape. Among the 
questions was this: "Why do you appear in so small 
a matter, when so many widows and orphans in the 
world are defrauded of greater matters % " This is 
exactly in the spirit of Huxley. On the other hand, 
"How are you regimented in the other world 1 " would 
have commended itself to Frederic W. H. Myers. It 
is odd that Defoe, in his Secrets of the Invisible TForld, 
roundly scolded Jeremy Taylor for these queries, 
which he considered "needless and impertinent " ; 
while that earnest believer in witches and goblins, 
Increase Mather, was even more deeply scandalised 
at Taylor's levity. We see in his questions to 
Taverner's tormentor, not exactly disbelief in the 
reality of the apparition, but undoubtedly that hesi- 
tancy which led him, in the Dissuasion from Popery, 
to point out how dangerous credulity is, and how 
unlikely it must be that God should give devils an 
opportunity to "abuse the world with notices and 
revelations of their own." 



194 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Another wild tale came before him in the adventure 
of a neatherd who was in his service at Portmore, and 
who was " amazed " by the apparition of an old woman, 
who pursued him for nearly nine months. In this 
case the ghost was also seen and followed by the 
neatherd's little dog. The old woman had buried 
twenty-eight shillings in her lifetime, and wished that 
this money, accompanied by an extremely tart reproof 
for his wicked and dissolute conduct, should go to one 
of her sons. At last, it would seem that the man 
consented to search for the money, which was buried 
under a hearth-stone "beyond the Bann Water," 
whereat the old woman was so rejoiced that she bade 
him lift her in his arms. He did so, and found her as 
light as a bag of feathers; whereupon she vanished 
forever in a most delicate music. Unfortunately, we 
are not told whether the twenty-eight shillings were 
discovered under the hearth-stone. In this story, also, 
both Jeremy Taylor and old Lady Conway took the 
acutest interest, but Alcock neglects to report the 
bishop's opinion on this case. 

As soon as his clergy were settled in the diocese, 
Taylor collected them at Lisburn, and earnestly exhorted 
them on their personal and public deportment. His 
words betray his cordial desire for reconciliation with 
all classes of his flock. The incumbents, so embarrass- 
ingly deposited in unwelcome propinquity to obstruc- 
tive parishioners, were above all things to "remember 
that discretion is the mistress of all graces." They 
were to discourage useless disputations ; they were to 
devote themselves to the spirit of meekness, and to 
endeavour to gain over their flock "by the impor- 
tunity of wise discourses." They were to "strive 



vi.] DROMORE 195 

to get the love of the congregation," yet "let it 
not degenerate into popularity." As High Church 
Anglicans they were to be careful to introduce no 
needless rites and gestures which would be offensive 
to parishioners, but to keep to what was required by 
the Church and established by law. They were to 
be most particular not to incense the congregation 
by exasperating or scolding them, nor to use irritating 
forms of language, "fantastical or schismatical terms." 
They must remember that they are ministering among 
persons, who from ignorance or prejudice are ready 
to be troublesome, and they must give no occasion to 
disturbance. If the minister finds in his congregation 
a contentious person, he is not to dispute with him ; he 
is to employ the man's zeal "in something that is good, 
let it be pressed to fight against sin." Nothing could 
be gentler or wiser than this advice, nothing more 
evangelical. 

But Jeremy Taylor, while earnestly recommending 
meekness, would not corrupt it into cowardice. The 
clergy are not to forget that they are to rule and to 
instruct, and that "he that receives from the people 
what he shall teach them, is like a nurse that asks 
of her child what physic she shall give him." They 
are not to suffer the common people to prattle about 
religious questions. They must see that no person 
in their parishes is ignorant of the foundations of 
faith, but they are forbidden to destroy their duty 
by "unreasonable compliance with the humours" of 
the flock. They are to check severely the common 
fault of the sectaries, who were wont, it seems, after a 
good dinner, to sit down and backbite their neighbours. 
In short, the clergy of Down and Connor were to be 



196 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

mild and yet firm, tender disciplinarians and constitu- 
tional rulers. It was a counsel of perfection, and little 
time went by before Jeremy Taylor and George Eust, 
who was bis right-hand man, had a painful awakening 
from their dream of a pacified and grateful Ulster. 
For two years, from the summer of 1661 to that of 
1663, all seems to have been tolerably calm in the 
dioceses, and then a storm of Presbyterian recusancy 
broke out again. 

Jeremy Taylor became aware of what was going 
on in the course of a visitation to the eastern part 
of his diocese. The village of Killinchy, on Strang- 
ford Lough, was the centre of a disaffection which 
was caused by a visit paid to County Down by the 
notorious adventurer, Colonel Thomas Blood. This 
man had set no value upon the religious life, but he 
knew how to play upon the sensibilities of fanatics. 
He pretended to be a convinced Presbyterian, and he 
was introduced to a knot of the ejected ministers by 
his brother-in-law, of the name of Lecky. It is only 
fair, however, to the Ulster Presbyterians to say that, 
though they were in a state of great religious fermenta- 
tion, they would have none of Blood and his plot, 
which was discovered in Dublin on the 22nd of May, 
and prevented. Blood escaped to England, where he 
had a chequered career as a rebel and a thief. But 
all these events greatly disturbed opinion in Down 
and Antrim, and led the government to some arbitrary 
acts. Taylor exaggerated the danger, and, on the 
11th of June, wrote in great trepidation to the Duke 
of Ormonde. He had discovered that John Drysdale, 
one of the most formidable of the ejected ministers, 
had returned from his exile in Scotland, and believed 



vi.] DROMORE 197 

that he was stirring up disaffection. He rashly- 
arrested Drysdale, although "on no particular charge," 
and then asked the Duke for instructions. The Dublin 
government took prompt action ; all the Presbyterian 
ministers who could be found in the counties of Antrim 
and Down were arrested, and imprisoned respectively 
at Carrickfergus and at Carlingford. After a consider- 
able period of incarceration, as no charge could be 
proved against them, they were allowed to withdraw 
to Scotland, and the storm passed over. 

In the new attitude which Jeremy Taylor adopted 
to his flock in 1663, it is possible that he was affected 
by the revival of zeal in England, of which the Ichabod 
of Ken, published in this very year, gives evidence. 
There was a strong feeling among youthful Anglicans 
that their elders were not showing a proper resent- 
ment against the " sad race of dissenters." Taylor 
may have been stirred by letters from England to 
show greater activity in silencing the disturbers of 
the peace of his diocese. 

The executive took all the responsibility for these 
acts of violence, but it is impossible to overlook the 
fact that it was Jeremy Taylor who had appealed to the 
Duke for help, and that it was he who sketched the 
policy which the Dublin government carried out. He 
had appealed to the force of the law to remove the 
ministers, on the ground that as long as they remained 
in his diocese it would be "a perpetual seminary of 
schism and discontents," and he had roundly accused 
them of being " all more than consenting " to Blood's 
plot. In this last matter there is evidence that he 
was misinformed, but he has to bear the responsi- 
bility of the results of his grievous error. 



198 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

In the midst of all these perturbations Archbishop 
Bramhall died, on the 25th of June, and was succeeded 
as Primate by Margetson, the Archbishop of Dublin, 
a man of much milder temper, who inaugurated a 
policy of conciliation in the northern provinces. I 
think it probable that Jeremy Taylor not merely 
acquiesced in this change, but positively welcomed 
it. At BramhalPs funeral he preached a sermon 
which, so willing are readers to find what they really 
bring with them, has been mentioned as an instance of 
Taylor's harsh and domineering temper, and of the 
tormented conditions of his mind. I can only say that 
I have searched this brilliant performance in vain for 
any such evidence of bias. The Funeral Sermon on 
Archbishop Bramhall is a composition in Taylor's most 
careful manner ; it is partly a rhapsody on the sure and 
certain hope of resurrection, and partly a very skilful 
and picturesque biography. The former section is curi- 
ously reminiscent of Sir Thomas Browne's then recent 
Urn-Burial; the preacher "will not now insist upon 
the story of the rising bones seen every year in Egypt, 
nor the pretences of the chemists that they from the 
ashes of flowers can reproduce the same beauties in 
colour and figure," but he runs his parallels through 
" night and day, the sun returning to the same point 
of east, every change of species, the eagle renewing her 
youth, and the snake her skin, the silkworm and the 
swallows, winter and summer, the fall and spring," all 
of them symbols and reflections of the glorious mystery 
of resurrection. We seem to be back again at Golden 
Grove, so graceful is the imagery, so ethereal the verbal 
music. 

He turns from these contemplations to a portrait of 



vi.] DROMORE 199 

the great man whom they have met to bury. He 
dwells on his energy, his intellect, his virtue ; he 
insists, with indignant zeal, upon Bramhall's heroic 
passion for the Church, and upon all that he was 
called upon to suffer. He was driven into poverty and 
exile by that wild storm "by which great Strafford 
and Canterbury fell " ; he returned to Ireland and to 
honour at an hour so late that neither the King nor 
Ormonde, "the King's great vicegerent," could reap 
from his restoration the whole benefit they had antici- 
pated. For Bramhall, with all his greatness, was then 
already old and broken. "It is true he was in the 
declension of his age and health. But his very ruins 
•were goodly. And they who saw the broken heaps of 
Pompey's Theatre, and the crushed obelisks, and the old 
face of beauteous Philenium, could not but admire the 
disordered glories of such magnificent structures, 
which were venerable in their very dust." In dilating 
upon these qualities, it must have been a great temp- 
tation to Jeremy Taylor to denounce the Presbyterians, 
whose tempestuous resistance had embittered Bram- 
hall's last hours, and who pursued him beyond the grave 
with their hatred. But not a word of anger escapes 
the preacher ; he does not so much as hint at any trouble 
in the northern dioceses. The Funeral Sermon on 
Bramhall is perfect in dignity and Christian reserve. 
It appears to me that in later times it has been read too 
little and too carelessly. It is the one piece of litera- 
ture produced by Jeremy Taylor in Ireland which is 
entirely worthy of his reputation as an artist. It is 
the one effusion of those agitated years which shows 
no decline from the lofty standard of his imagination 
and intellect. 



200 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

Jeremy Taylor's principal literary occupation, how- 
ever, during the closing years of his life was the 
composition of an extremely lengthy Dissuasion from 
Popery addressed to the people of Ireland. He tells us 
that his brethren, the prelates of that country, set this 
task upon him, and that at first he was unwilling to 
adventure upon it. But, having once taken it up, he 
seemed incapable of dropping it. The viscous task 
adhered to his fingers, and one whose memory was 
so accurately stored with patristic instances needed 
but the very smallest intellectual stress to continue 
the disquisition almost indefinitely. A first — and 
surely a sufficient — instalment appeared in quarto 
in 1664; but Jeremy Taylor could not break through 
the glutinous chain of his animadversions, and pro- 
ceeded to produce a Second Part, being a Vindication 
of the First, and further Reproof of Roman Error. 
This he had sent to press when he died, and it appeared 
in the autumn of 1667. Had his life been prolonged, 
we might now possess a Third Part, and a Fourth. 
This is the most languid and unreadable of Jeremy 
Taylor's writings. It is deformed by patronising 
remarks about "the poor deluded Irish," and in par- 
ticular goes out of its way to attack the use and study 
of the Irish language, which Taylor thought barbarous 
and deforming, and wished to prohibit. His entire want 
of sympathy with the Celtic mind is illustrated by the 
agony of distress into which he is thrown by certain 
instances of its " miserable superstition and blindness." 
In every sentence we are conscious of the chasm which 
divided him from all sections of his flock, of what 
Matthew Arnold might call "the profound sense of 
estrangement" from them, " immense, incurable, fatal." 



vi.] DROMORE 201 

A recent learned writer on Jeremy Taylor has 
called A Dissuasion from Popery " one of the most in- 
teresting of his writings." The interest which Mr. 
Alexander Gordon finds, must reside, I think, solely 
in the definite statement of the dead-lock existing 
between the old religion of Ireland and the new, and 
that is surely sufficiently contained in the dedication 
to the Duke of Ormonde. The rest of this huge treatise 
we must not allow partiality for Taylor, or sympathy 
for his isolated position, to make us attempt to admire. 
The antipathy it displays to the people of Ireland, its 
incurable Philistinism and ignorance of the Celtic 
temperament, are not less disappointing because they 
y:ere shared by the majority of Englishmen in that 
dreary period. And, as for Jeremy Taylor himself, so 
far from thinking it " interesting " that he should spend 
his last years almost exclusively in this multiplication 
of insulting diatribes against the ancestral religion 
of his country, we should regard his labour mournfully 
as a cardinal example of that objectless waste of energy 
which Coleridge deplored as the worst of misfortunes : — 

" With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll ; 
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ? 
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, 
And Hope without an object cannot live." 

Meanwhile the bishop was carrying on his campaign 
against the Presbyterians of his diocese, and in this 
he was aided by Sir Richard Kennedy, who acted in 
Ulster as Judge of Assize. This lawyer, who was one 
of the Barons of the Exchequer for Ireland, supported 
Taylor in all his decisions, and in fanatical zeal even 
went beyond the bishop's desires. Kennedy " infinitely 



202 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

discountenanced and punished" the Nonconformists, 
and showed an intemperate activity in all the affairs 
of the Church. He went to such extremities that he 
had to be checked by orders from the Privy Council, 
which became alarmed at the reports of his severity. 
Among the gentry of Ulster, Lord Massereene was 
solitary in his efforts for peace and general indulgence, 
although others, such as Lady Ards and Lord Dun- 
cannon, interceded for personal friends of their own. 
By the early months of 1G64 "the generality of the 
ministers of the North were either banished, imprisoned 
or driven into corners," but the anger of the populace 
was so great that the Duke of Ormonde found it wise 
to insist upon a slackening of the persecution. Jeremy 
Taylor "stormed at this vague favour for noncon- 
formity," and encouraged Kennedy to pursue his work. 
But the Irish Primate had determined to be " civil to 
the brethren of Down," and Sir Eichard Kennedy was 
felt to be so embarrassing to the government at Dublin, 
that he was urged to take occasion of the Lord Lieuten- 
ant's going over to England to accompany him, and 
not to return to Ireland. Jeremy Taylor found him- 
self deserted and solitary. 

On the 25th of May 1GG4 he wrote a pressing letter 
to his old friend Sheldon, now Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, imploring to be translated to a less arduous see. 
Sheldon, it seems, had said that Jeremy Taylor him- 
self was the only hindrance to his being removed to 
an English bishopric. Taylor protested that he could 
not conjecture what the Primate meant, but it is easy 
to see that his reputation for lack of suppleness and 
moderation had brought him into disgrace with the 
Court. No one appreciated his painful zeal, no one 



vi.] DROMORE 203 

had wished him to be so stern and unbending to his 
clergy. His appeal to be solaced by a see in some other 
part of England or Ireland is pathetic. He writes : — 

" I hunibly desire that your grace will not wholly lay me 
aside, and cast off all thoughts of removing me. For no man 
shall with a greater diligence, humility and observance en- 
deavour to make up his other disabilities than I shall. The 
case is so that the country does not agree with my health as 
it hath done formerly, till the last Michaelmas ; and if your 
grace be not willing I should die immaturely, I shall still hope 
you will bring me to or near yourself once more. But to God 
and to your grace I humbly submit the whole affair, humbly 
desiring a kind return to this letter, and the comfort of a little 
hope." 

But Charles II. seems to have been told that the Pres- 
byterians of Ulster "had been sufferers for the King," 
and Jeremy Taylor's last chance of promotion or even 
of translation passed away. He had pleased nobody ; 
his flock were persuaded that he was cruel and unjust, 
and the government regarded him as dangerous and 
embarrassing. For the rest of his life, as it was indi- 
cated to him again, he must make the best he could 
of Down and Connor. He buried himself in literature, 
and resigned himself to inevitable disappointment. 
From this time forward his animal spirits seem to 
have decayed. He had lost his hope, and with it 
went his energy. To this moment probably belongs 
the curious story preserved by Michael Lort, the 
antiquary, that Taylor desired his secretary to procure 
all the copies of his Liberty of Prophesying which could 
be found, and made a bonfire of them in the market- 
place of Dromore. It was not, indeed, like Jeremy 
Taylor to destroy one of his own works — although 
it may be noticed that Liberty of Prophesying is prac- 



204 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

tically the only one of all his didactic books which 
he did not include in the list of modern English 
divinity drawn up at Graham's request in 1660 — but, 
if the tale is true, it shows a repudiation of his early 
theories of toleration which is melancholy in itself, 
and not out of keeping with his distressing implaca- 
bility as a bishop. The iron had entered into his 
soul, and he was no longer the Jeremy Taylor whose 
patient energy and active sympathy we have loved. 

We hear little more of him in a public capacity. 
He had a farm of forty acres at Magheralin, probably 
the same which had been allotted to him through Sir 
William Petty 's offices when he first arrived in Ireland. 
He devoted himself to this estate, and traces of 
his beneficence remain in the whole district around 
it. Traditions of him are said to be still extant in 
several of the surrounding villages, at Soldierstown, 
at Derriaghy, at Magheragall, at Ballinderry. The 
places where Jeremy Taylor is said to have "resided" 
are numerous in the south-west of Antrim and the 
north-west of Down. It must be remembered that 
wherever a man of such prominence spent a single 
night would easily be quoted in tradition as one of 
his "residences." He probably lived chiefly at Hills- 
borough until April 1663, when Colonel Arthur Hill 
died, an event which robbed the bishop of one of 
his few close friends. He certainly still had a home 
in or near Portmore, and when he left Hillsborough, 
the house he had built in the Castle Street of 
Lisburn, opposite the doors of the cathedral, would be 
his official residence. Everything seems to point to 
a rapid decline in vitality during the last three years 
of his disenchanted life. He had been an enthusiast 



VI.] DROMORE 205 

for liberty and love, but circumstances had forced him 
to adopt the guise of a tyrant. He had lived for the 
affection of his friends, and he found himself solitary 
in a strange land. When the emotions of a sensitive 
man cease to have an object, he soon pines away. 

Jeremy Taylor's interest in architecture was notice- 
able, and as a builder he stamped his mark upon his 
diocese. Unhappily, fire and the restorer have left 
but few examples of his art for us to judge of its merit. 
Until 1902, however, one specimen of Taylor as an 
architect still survived intact. On a little eminence 
south of the road which winds through the parish of 
Ballinderry, in Antrim, four miles north of Moira, was 
to be seen a deserted church, white-washed, with an 
empty bell-cot, its chancel-end loaded with ivy, its only 
remarkable feature being a row of circular-headed 
mullion windows. This was the shell of that church 
which Jeremy Taylor started building in 1665, and 
to furnish which he dismantled of its oak fittings the 
old chapel on Lough Beg, where he had officiated while 
he was at Portmore. He brought slates for its roof 
from Aberdovey, in Wales, and he seems to have spent a 
good deal of money in making it a really pretty specimen 
of belated Jacobean church architecture. It was in 
danger of falling into complete ruin, when Mr. F. J. 
Biggar, of Ardrie, Belfast, brought its rare interest to 
the notice of Mrs. Walkington of Ballinderry, who had 
it very carefully restored by Mr. W. J. Fennell, under 
the inspection of Sir Thomas Drew. No new feature 
was introduced, and the work was carried out with 
the most conservative care. It was reconsecrated, in 
October 1902, by Dr. Welland, the present Bishop of 
Down, Connor and Dromore, and it is by far the most 



206 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

interesting personal relic of Jeremy Taylor which 
exists in Ireland. 

There is little more to be recorded of his life. 
About three years after the death of Arthur Hill, he 
became engaged in a vexatious dispute with the 
Colonel's son, Moses Hill, as to certain revenues from 
the Castlereagh estate, which Jeremy Taylor had 
enjoyed, and to which he said that he possessed a 
right as bishop. In this Lord Conway agreed with 
him, but Moses Hill protested that these had merely 
been paid to Taylor as a matter of courtesy and 
personal friendship. A lawsuit was the result, which 
came before both Houses of the Irish Parliament ; the 
rents were sequestered and the suit was still pending 
when the bishop died. This was a sad conclusion to 
the long and harmonious friendship between Jeremy 
Taylor and the house of Hillsborough. By this time 
it is evident that Taylor was irritable with failing 
strength. Until the autumn of 1663, however, Ireland 
had suited his bodily health, and the conjecture that 
he fell a victim to the supposed swampiness of his 
dwelling rests on no evidence. As long as he resided 
on the heights of Hillsborough he was in one of the 
wholesomest spots in the county of Down. Later on, 
in February 1666, when all Ireland, and England too, 
was ringing with the strange, half-miraculous cures 
which Valentine Greatrakes, "the Stroker,"was effect- 
ing by a kind of massage, Lord Conway wished Jeremy 
Taylor to try whether the itinerant magician could 
not recover him of his "distemper," but we know not 
whether Taylor allowed Greatrakes to rub him, nor 
what his distemper was. 

His only surviving son, Charles, was now about 



vi.] DBOMORE 207 

twenty-four years of age. He was consumptive, and 
he died at the close of July 1667; on the 2nd of 
August he was buried in London, in the church of 
St. Margaret's, Westminster. On the following day 
Jeremy Taylor, who had visited the bedside of a fever- 
patient in Lisburn on the 24th of July, was taken ill, 
and though he can hardly have heard of Charles's death, 
the desperate condition of his only son must have been 
known to him, and doubtless had its effect in depress- 
ing his vital force. He lay sick for ten days in his 
house at Lisburn, the disease being described as a 
fever, and on the 13th of August 1667 he died, being 
in all probability within a few days of completing his. 
fifty-fourth year. It is probable that he expected to 
die, and perhaps made no effort to recover ; he is said 
to have wished to lie in his new church at Ballinderry, 
but that was not yet consecrated. He added, there- 
fore, and these are recorded as being his last words, 
"Bury me at Dromore." His body, accordingly, was 
taken on the 21st of August to the cathedral which 
he had built in that little town. It was deposited in 
the vault beneath the chancel, the funeral service being 
performed by George Eust. 

Such was the death of Jeremy Taylor, an event 
which seems to have attracted no notice at all in 
England and to have created little sensation even in 
Ireland. There is something poignantly sad, and 
almost ignominious, in this close to the life of a sensitive 
man of genius. After a long experience of poverty and 
glory, he had become wealthy at the sacrifice of almost 
everything else which makes life desirable. We mourn 
at the spectacle of the passing of one who had deserved 
to be happy, and who had escaped happiness by so 



208 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

small an interval, yet had escaped it wholly at the end ; 
who had manifestly striven to do his duty, yet with so 
strange a want of tact in himself and of appositeness 
in his surroundings, that the result in the eye of 
history bears a worse air even than dereliction would. 
His Irish friends in the non-clerical world of 
the diocese were all dead, or, like Lord Conway, 
settled in England. No one seems to have cared to 
preserve Jeremy Taylor's memory, which was not 
recalled until, in 1827, Eichard Mant, who was then 
Bishop of Down and Connor, was roused by Heber's 
reproaches to set up in the cathedral church of Lisburn 
a tablet ; this contained a lengthy and eulogistic 
epitaph, claiming for Jeremy Taylor that his renown 
was "second to that of none of the illustrious sons 
whom the Anglican Church hath brought forth. " Mean- 
while no stone was erected to mark the place of 
Taylor's sepulture in Dromore Cathedral, and in 1670 
the same fate befell the remains of his successor, 
George Rust. There is a story that the bones of 
these prelates were removed and scattered to make 
room for a later Bishop of Dromore, and that when 
Percy came to the diocese in 1782, he had them 
collected and piously reinterred. This tradition has 
been shown to rest on very slender evidence, but no 
doubt the remains of the bishops did disappear. When 
the Cathedral of Dromore was rebuilt in 1866, certain 
bones were discovered lying in confusion. It was 
taken for granted that these were the remains of the 
bishops, and as one of the skulls was very much larger 
than the rest, it was thought that it must belong to 
the most intellectual of them. On this slender basis 
of identification, it was buried in the choir, and a brass 



vi.] DROMORE 209 

proclaims the doubtful fact that here lie the bones of 
the celebrated Dr. Jeremy Taylor. 1 

A better authenticated and a far more durable 
monument to him was raised by his faithful companion 
and affectionate admirer, George Rust, Dean of Connor, 
the last and warmest of his friends. This took the 
shape of a funeral sermon, which is a composition 
beautiful in itself, and as a contribution to Taylor's 
biography simply invaluable. It was preached at 
Dromore on the 21st of August, and repeated in 
Dublin, at the funeral service, on the 3rd of September 
1667. Rust, who is not known to have been personally 
acquainted with Taylor until the latter invited him over 
in 1661 to aid him in administering the diocese, must 
have obtained his information regarding earlier years 
mainly from the conversation of the bishop himself. 
Much that we know of Jeremy Taylor's life we owe 
entirely to Rust, and it is remarkable that on many 
points where Rust's statements have been distrusted or 
even rejected, further examination has proved him to 

1 It is impossible, while recording the obscurity in which the 
bones of this glorious son of the English Church were permitted 
to lie in his Irish exile, not to recall the burning epitaph which 
Boileau wrote in 1694 for the unhonoured grave in Brussels of 
one whom Jeremy Taylor valued above all the other conti- 
nental divines of his time : — 

Au pied de cet autel de structure grossiere, 
Git sans pompe, enferme" dans une vile biere, 
Le plus savant mortel qui jamais ait ^crit : 
Arnauld, qui sur la grace, instruit par Jesus-Christ, 
Combattant pour l'Eglise, a, dans l'Eglise meme, 
Souffert plus d'un outrage et plus d'un anatheme. 
Not a word in this but is directly true of Taylor. But a 
reference to Pelagius follows, and Boileau's epitaph ceases to 
be applicable. 

O 



210 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. vi. 

be in the right. No life of Jeremy Taylor would be 
complete without the words in which, closely and 
successfully imitating the style of his subject, George 
Rust paints him as he knew him : — 

" This great prelate had the good humour of a gentleman, the 
eloquence of an orator, the fancy of a poet, and the acuteness 
of a schoolman, the profoundness of a philosopher, the wisdom 
of a councillor, the sagacity of a prophet, the reason of an 
angel, and the piety of a saint. He had devotion enough for 
a cloister, learning enough for a university, and wit enough 
for a college of virtuosi ; and had his parts and endowments 
been parcelled out among his poor clergymen that he left 
behind him, it would perhaps have made one of the best 
dioceses in the world. . . . He is fixed in an orb of glory, and 
shines among his brethren-stars, that in their several ages gave 
light to the world, and turned many souls unto righteousness ; 
and we that are left behind, though we can never reach his 
perfections, must study to imitate his virtues, that we may at 
last come to sit at his feet in the mansions of glory.' 



CHAPTEE VII 

TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 

No one has asserted with more boldness than Coleridge 
the pre-eminence of Jeremy Taylor as a man of letters. 
He recognised his limitations as a theologian, as a 
thinker, but he insisted on his art as a writer, on the 
majesty of his "great and lovely mind." Coleridge 
placed Jeremy Taylor among the four principal masters 
of the English language in the august first half of the 
seventeenth century ; he " used to reckon Shakespeare 
and Bacon, Milton and Taylor, four-square, each 
against each." So luminous and penetrating are the 
words of Coleridge on Jeremy Taylor that we can but 
deeply regret the fact that they are casual and 
occasional, and are scattered here and there over the 
extent of his writings. "I believe such a complete 
man hardly shall we see again . . . such a miraculous 
combination of erudition, broad, deep, and omnigeneous, 
of logic subtle as well as acute, and as robust as agile 
. . . and of genuine imagination, with its streaming 
force unifying all at one moment like that of the setting 
sun when, through an interspace of blue sky no larger 
than itself, it emerges from the cloud to sink behind 
the mountain." How admirably just this is, with a 
felicity of expression worthy of the subject himself, 

211 



212 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

only those can fully realise who turn to it from immer- 
sion in the alternate cloud and sunshine of Taylor's 
own marvellous writings. 

It is remarkable that in this case of a genius com- 
parable only with those of Shakespeare, Bacon, and 
Milton, we find ourselves confronted by a comparative 
neglect which requires some explanation. By the 
side of the fulness of exposition which has been given 
to the lives and writings of the three, the obscurity 
of the fourth is noticeable. But, in the first place, we 
must observe that the fame of Jeremy Taylor has been 
injured among general readers by the fact that he is 
a divine, and among divines by the fact that he is 
an artist. The theologian who is also a man of letters 
suffers from several disadvantages which criticism finds 
it easier to state than to remove. In the first place, like 
other professional and scientific authors, much of what 
he says, and indeed the important part of it, is definite 
statement into which the element of style cannot enter. 
The theologian, moreover, is obliged to use a great 
number of formulas and instances which are not his 
own, and with the form of which he dare not tamper. 
He is bound to have those words of Scripture, which 
never can be his own words, for ever on his lips. Be- 
fore, therefore, we can reach the claim of the theologian 
to be an independent man of letters, we have to clear 
away a great deal which is said solely for purpose of 
instruction, and a great deal, too, which is beautiful, 
but which is not the substance of his own mind. 

The theologian who devotes much attention to 
literary form is liable to suspicion of neglect of his 
primal duty. It is not to be questioned that Jeremy 
Taylor's astonishing brilliancy has damaged his influ- 



Vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 213 

ence as a pure divine. From the very first he was not 
a favourite with persons of a strenuous or Puritanical 
bent of mind, and could not be ; because his pre-occupa- 
tion with beauty was bound to be viewed with disfavour 
amongst those who felt that the humblest and baldest 
types of speech were sufficient to express exhortation, 
supplication, and contrition. But together with this 
too copious use of the ornaments of speech, there 
entered a certain forbidding sense of moral ineffective- 
ness, which, I believe, has done more than anything 
else to deprive Jeremy Taylor of the predominant 
rank which his art and his intellect demand for him. 
People are pleased that an author should be positive, 
definite, almost stubborn, while the personal attitude 
of Taylor to the faith is curiously irresolute. This 
strange condition is illuminated by a flash of intuition 
in one of Coleridge's letters (Nov. 3, 1814), where he 
says that the real "opinion" of Jeremy Taylor, as 
contrasted with the glorious rush of his eloquence, 
is "all weather-eaten, dim, useless, a ghost in marble." 
To illustrate this, by emphasising the contrast be- 
tween Taylor's rigidity concerning the authority of 
the Church and his latitude in interpreting its Articles, 
would carry us into a field which must be carefully 
avoided in these pages; but this is an important 
element of what we may call discomfort in the attitude 
of the reader to his writings. 

It is possible that the antagonisms and schisms 
within the English Church of the seventeenth century 
tended to depreciate the directness of its literary 
appeal. The result of alwaj^s having to remember that 
offence might be taken by a large proportion of 
hearers must have been a constant disturbance of the 



214 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

reflecting faculties of the preacher. It was only a very 
resolute character which could not be moved, either to 
timidity or else to acrimony, by this sense of latent 
opposition. The great English theologians of the 
seventeenth century — with one or two exceptions, 
among whom Barrow is prominent — strike us as want- 
ing in that profound physical vitality, of which, on 
the other side of the Channel, Bossuet and Fenelon 
were the types. But the absence of a powerful 
Nonconformity is not to be overlooked as an immense 
aid to French Catholic oratory. 

We must now rapidly indicate Jeremy Taylor's 
position. The theological literature of the seventeenth 
century possesses a certain fixed character which to 
the casual student of to-day is apt to seem monotonous 
and to exclude individuality. But when we begin to 
examine it, the different tones of voice, the different keys 
of colour, do not fail to assert themselves. When once 
we perceive the distinctions, we are even in danger 
of exaggerating them. We find ourselves wondering 
that any one can ever have supposed that a page of 
Pearson was like a page of Tillotson. We close our 
ears, and the tones of the voices seem entirely various, 
although in some cases it is difficult to define the 
difference. More than all, where the general texture 
is bare and rough, the presence of brilliant ornament 
becomes almost painfully insistent. One can imagine 
a reader, long steeped in Barrow, turning away, 
dazzled and embarrassed, from the gorgeous embroi- 
deries of Jeremy Taylor. And, indeed, the first dis- 
tinction a critic has to make in defining the literary 
position of Taylor is founded on his own temperament. 
We must cut him off at once from pure theologians 



vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 215 

like Pearson and from pure grammarians like Wilkins. 
With those who cared for nothing but the pursuit of 
naked truth and with those whose pleasure lay in the 
logical sequence of language, he had no vital sympathy. 
He cared for truth mainly as a pathway to emotion, and 
for words only in the effect of their harmonious and 
telling arrangement. 

The recognition of this fact greatly simplifies our 
task in seeking to define Taylor's position in English 
literature. His preoccupation with form, his magni- 
ficence in ornament, relegate him to a class in which 
but few of the divines of the seventeenth century 
make so much as an effort to accompany him. In the 
generation which preceded his, Donne and Joseph 
Hall had cultivated prose with studied care. In his 
• own, Chillingworth possessed grace and rapidity of 
movement, Fuller, Henry More, and Cudworth were 
writers of great excellence. Without, however, in the 
slightest degree depreciating any of these admirable 
men, it is plain that in a serious comparison of them, 
as mere wielders of English, with Jeremy Taylor, all 
but Donne and Fuller withdraw into the second place 
at once. With the sonorous majesty of Donne's 
organ-sentences, the simpler and sweeter phrases of 
Taylor have some relation. Donne, with all his 
differences, is the one English preacher who seems to 
have left a mark on the style of Taylor. But the 
younger advanced beyond the elder in suppleness and 
variety, and even in splendour, as far as Pope advanced 
beyond Dryden in neatness and wit. 

The only rival to Taylor is Fuller, who, if we 
examine closely, proves to be not so much a rival as a 
happy contrast. The present generation has no need 



216 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

to be reminded of the familiar genius of Fuller, 
garrulous and jocular, that " most appetising bundle of 
contradictioDs," as Professor Saintsbury has denned it. 
But we are perhaps in danger of overvaluing the 
prosaic picturesqueness of Fuller's active mind. He 
has been one of the most fortunate of English writers, 
indulged, excused, and petted by criticism, so that his 
very faults are found charming in the eyes of his 
doting admirers. Wit, as we know, was the sum and 
substance of his intellect, and it produced delightful 
effects, fresh and entertaining and boundlessly quaint. 
But to turn from it to the solemn art of Jeremy 
Taylor is to rise into a higher, if a rarer, atmosphere, 
to be nearer heaven, to come within earshot of a 
sublimer music. There is really no object in com- 
paring two writers, the one so amiably mundane, the 
other so shining and seraphical. 

In the foregoing chapters the writings of Jeremy 
Taylor have been briefly described in the order of 
their composition, as portions of the biographical 
narrative. This procedure seemed convenient for several 
reasons. In the first place, for its novelty, since 
hitherto the various critical examinations of his works, 
of which Heber's is the most elaborate, have invariably 
discussed them in groups, the devotional books to- 
gether, the casuistical together. In the second place, 
to give each publication its historical position, with a 
brief statement of its character and contents, was to 
leave us free, in the general summing-up, to ignore 
altogether what is not essential. By resigning the bio- 
graphical order, we should lose most important evidence 
as to the growth, maturity, and decline of Taylor's 
genius. By retaining it, we give ourselves an oppor- 



vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 217 

tunity of examining that genius only when it reaches 
its zenith of force and splendour. No writer is more 
cruelly misjudged if we throw his writings into a sack, 
and take from them samples at random. In his case 
it is imperative that criticism should select before it 
gives its final judgment. 

The importance of approaching Jeremy Taylor when 
he is at his best is obvious when we examine the habit 
of his mind. No great author displays more curiously 
the phenomenon of growth. The style of Taylor, in 
all its happiest effects, is sensorial • he did not begin 
to write well until he saw with distinctness. That is 
the keynote of the genius of the man, it was one 
which fed on pictures and impressions. This class of 
intellect is always slow in growth, because it depends 
on the accumulation of rich and complex reminiscences, 
which have to be stored in the archives of the brain 
before they can be brought out and used. A French 
critic has noted that " un style d'images n'est jamais 
precoce," and it is not until Jeremy Taylor is thirty 
years of age that he begins to write what it gives a 
sympathetic reader pleasure to follow. When he 
arrived at Golden Grove, he had tasted the agitation 
of life ; he had acquired, in peril and unrest, the habit 
of keen sensation. There followed complete repose of 
brain and nerves, just at the moment when the precious 
gift was sufficiently stored, when the mechanism was 
completed, and needed but the touch of the operator ; 
when, in fact, Taylor had arrived at the condition 
which Fenelon described when he said, " Mon cerveau 
est comme un cabinet de peintures dont tous les 
tableaux remueraient et se rangeraient au gre du 
maitre de la maison." 



218 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

But if a style so concrete as Jeremy Taylor's- does 
not belong to early life, neither is it characteristic of 
old age. We need therefore not be surprised to find 
the pictures fading early from the walls of Jeremy 
Taylor's brain. In fact, his visual faculty slackened 
soon, although the linguistic faculty survived to the 
end. But as we have seen that his genius was essen- 
tially sensorial, we can feel no surprise that when it 
ceased to be stirred by images and sensations, it ceased 
to be attractive. Our biographical method, then, has 
emphasised the rise and fall, and it has prepared us to 
make here the somewhat sweeping statement that all of 
Jeremy Taylor's work which is first-rate was published 
between 1650 and 1655; that outside this absolutely 
consummate group of his writings there is a less bril- 
liant but still admirable group extending from Liberty 
of Prophesying in 1647 to The Wortliy Communicant in 
1660 ; and that the rest of his works, with very slight 
exceptions, may be dismissed from literary criticism 
altogether. 

In examining the books in which the style of 
Jeremy Taylor is seen at his best, we notice first, as 
their prominently distinguishing feature, their beauty. 
Taylor is not afraid of bold and brilliant effects, he is 
even ready to court them. His preoccupation with 
beauty, not in any secondary or suggested form, but in 
the most gorgeous scarlet and gold of fancy, and accom- 
panied by flutes and hautboys of calculated cadence, 
distinguishes him at once from all his fellows. There 
is nobody, except Sir Thomas Browne, in the hundred 
years of English prose between the Euphuists and 
Shaftesbury, who can be mentioned in the same breath 
with Taylor for this richness of imaginative ornament. 



vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 219 

But he is lifted above all prose-writers of the seven- 
teenth century, even above Browne, by his simplicity, 
his natural air. He says things which are audacious 
enough for Shakespeare, and gorgeous enough for 
Euskin, but he says them in perfect naturalness. It 
is in this that his powerful charm resides, and it is to 
do Jeremy Taylor the crudest injury to confound his 
manner with that of Lyly or the later disciples of 
Marini. When the author of Euplmes tells us that 
" the precious stone autharsitis, being thrown into the 
fire, looketh black and half dead, but being cast into 
the water, glisteneth like the sunbeams," he is intro- 
ducing into his narrative a piece of dead ornament to 
dazzle us. He knows absolutely nothing about "the 
precious stone autharsitis," but he thinks that it will 
impress the reader. But when Taylor says, " A brother 
if he be worthy is the readiest and nearest to be a 
friend, but till he be so, he is but the twilight of the 
day, and but the blossom to the fairest fruit of 
paradise," the illustration is apt and just, and, as it 
were, an inevitable aid in the expansion of the thought. 
It is in this extraordinary vitality and organic 
growth of his metaphors that Taylor is really, what he 
is so often called, "the Shakespeare of English prose." 1 
His visual memory was a well of images into which his 
fancy was incessantly descending, to return brimful 
of new combinations and illustrations. His taste was 
very pure, and for all his florid ornament, there is 
perhaps no writer of the time whose metaphors seem 

1 This epithet was first applied to Jeremy Taylor not, as is 
commonly supposed, by Gray, but by William Mason, the 
biographer of Gray. Mason is not rich enough to bear being 
robbed of the happiest of all his phrases. 



220 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

to us less forced, or less incongruous. Certain primal 
elements are extremely fascinating to him; of the 
attraction to him of effects of light and of water we 
shall presently speak. But it is to be noted that all 
his inductions from natural phenomena have that 
fervour which is needful to give this species of orna- 
ment real value. When his prose is richest, when it 
leaps with greatest daring from image to image, it 
always preserves " that entire, unsuspecting, unf earing, 
childlike profusion of feeling" which Coleridge so 
accurately noted as its leading characteristic. Whether 
Taylor illustrates his meaning by the roughness of a 
sour grape upon the palate or by the penetration of a 
bee's sting in the finger, whether it is the unskilful 
navigation of lads in a boat rocked upon the tide 
which inflames his reflection, or the flutter of leaf-gold 
under the breath of an artisan, it is always his sincere 
and vivid emotion which shines forth below the image. 
He writes with extraordinary happiness about light 
and water. Nothing would be easier, if we had the 
space, than to produce an anthology from his works, 
and confine it scrupulously to those two themes. He 
is quick, beyond any other man then living, in observ- 
ing the effects of flashes of lightning in a dark room, 
of beams of the sun breaking through the vapour of 
rain, and divided by it into sheaves of rays, of wax 
candles burning in the sunshine, of different qualities 
of beautiful radiance in the eyes of a woman, of a 
child, of a hawk. Light escaping from, or dispersed 
by, or streaming through cloud, is incessantly in- 
teresting to him. But perhaps it is in all the forms 
of water that he most delights, water bubbling up 
through turf, or standing in drops on stone, or racing 



vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 221 

down a country lane ; the motion and whisper of little 
wandering rivulets ; the " purls of a spring that sweats 
through the bottom of a bank, and intenerates the 
stubborn pavement till it hath made it fit for the im- 
pression of a child's foot." He seems to have been 
for ever watching the eddies of the Towey and the 
windings and bubblings of its tributaries, and the 
music of those erratic waters passed into his speech. 

Like all his contemporaries, he examines nature with 
near-sighted eyes. The mountains of Wales, even that 
panorama which was seventy years later to fill the 
first landscape-painters and descriptive poets with 
rapture, are as unseen by Jeremy Taylor as the tors 
of Dartmoor are by Herrick. The author of the 
E^iautos has no word about the great outlines of the 
country-side, but in the articulations of an insect or 
the softness of the stalk of a violet nothing escapes 
him. He notes the darting movement of a mouse 
over his shoe ; the elasticity and the tenderness of the 
young ringed tendrils of a vine ; the metamorphosis of 
the silkworm-moth, that "casting its pearly seeds for 
the young to breed, leaveth its silk for man, and dieth 
all white and winged in the shape of a flying creature, 
— so is the progress of souls." For glow-worms, grass- 
hoppers, butterflies, and the little dark ephemera that 
cling to walls, he has a searching eye, and fixes on 
their characteristic phenomena. He notes all the 
vicissitudes in the life of an apple-tree, its gum, its 
sterile branches, the fragility of its blossoms. He is 
acutely sensitive to odours, and finds metaphors for 
his use in the volatility of balsam and nard and 
camphor, in the keenness of their attack upon the 
brain, in the curious association of perfumes with 



222 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

events and places. Ugly things take their rank, too, 
in the records of his memory ; he stores up for illus- 
tration the icy stiffness of a dead man's fingers, the 
intolerable beating of a watch in the darkness, the 
disagreeable sound of gravel on a wheel. These 
instances of Jeremy Taylor's sensorial style might be 
prolonged almost indefinitely. With the solitary 
exception of Shakespeare, there is no writer in all 
our early literature who has made so fresh and copious 
and effective a use of metaphor taken directly from the 
observation of natural objects. 

With this pre-occupation with phenomena, Jeremy 
Taylor combines a habit which we may hastily fancy to 
be antagonistic to it. There is no great writer, except 
Burton, who introduces into his English prose such 
incessant citation of or reference to the classics as 
Taylor does. But this custom does not often impair 
the freshness of his outlook upon life. It has always 
to be remembered that the imitation of the ancients 
was a form of originality in the seventeenth century ; 
it enabled writers to be daring and yet safe. The 
method of use of the classical poets by a master of 
such genius as Jeremy Taylor was either that he said, 
with their help, but by no means in literal translation, 
what had not been said in English before ; or else that 
he transposed the style of the ancients into another 
style, entirely distinct from theirs and personal to 
himself. Even Democritus Junior had taken that 
view of the independence of his industry — " as a good 
housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of 
cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many 
flowers, and makes a new bundle of all, I have labori- 
ously collected this cento out of divers writers." 



vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 223 

Taylor, however, does not dream of collecting such 
a cento, or of illustrating the ancient authors in any 
way ■ he forces them to illustrate him, generally very 
much indeed against their will, with haughty dis- 
regard of their intention. He is impregnated with 
the odour of some of the ancients, and he uses them, 
as we saw that he used the natural phenomena around 
him, as a well of images into which he dips his 
imagination. 

Sometimes he fuses the fragment of Latin poetry into 
his prose without much alteration, as when, in The 
Worthy Communicant, we find, "What if you empty all 
the Msevanian valleys, and drive the fat lambs in 
flocks unto the altars % "What if you sacrifice a herd 
of white bulls from Clitumnus % " because Statius had 
said : — 

" Nee si vacuet Msevania valles, 

Aut prpestent niveos Cliturona novalia tauros, 

Sufficiam." 

But he does not prefer this metallic method, and 
much more often he uses the classical quotation or 
reference merely as an ingredient, sometimes faintly 
suggested, sometimes left so obvious as to give its 
unction to the passage while yet defying definite 
paraphrase, as in A Discourse of Friendship, where an 
exquisitely graceful chain of reflections is based upon 
the 

" Ut praestem Pyladen, aliquis milii prnestet Oresten " 

of Martial without a single word being borrowed from 
the epigrammatist, although the sense of the Latin 
is unmistakably dissolved into the English. It must 
be confessed that the latter method, employing the 



224 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

ancients as a gradus of experiences, is by far the 
more fortunate, and that the English style of Jeremy 
Taylor is usually spoiled when he attempts the crude 
transference of classic poetry into his own prose. 

It is impossible not to wonder whether the profusion 
of Latin and Greek quotation in Jeremy Taylor's 
sermons was appreciated by his auditors. There can be 
no doubt that it was admired ; yet even in that learned 
age Burton had refrained from Greek, because this 
language was unfamiliar to the public. Taylor almost 
invariably translates, at once, any passage which he 
has quoted in the original, and it is not impossible 
that the translation only was spoken, and the Greek 
added when the sermon was published. We know, 
indeed, that pulpit-learning was in fashion, and that 
there were people who, as Earle tells us in his Micro- 
cosmograjjhie, came to sermons only that they might 
approve of the references to Tacitus and Seneca. But 
Taylor would not have encouraged mere pretentious 
pedantry. He doubtless considered, in the spirit of 
the then dying Renaissance, that there was no safety 
for literature, no solid basis for taste, but in depend- 
ence on the classics. There is scarcely a single passage 
in his variegated writings in which he admits con- 
sciousness of the existence of a modern author who 
does not write in Latin. This scorn of vernacular 
literature is very paradoxical in a man who laboured 
to write English with the most exquisite art and 
delicacy. It has already been observed that Taylor 
had a peculiar cult for Prudentius, whom he is never 
tired of quoting. The Spanish poet would have for 
him the double charm of belonging to the classical tradi- 
tion, and yet of being Christian. Perhaps something 



vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 225 

in the career of Prudentius, a courtier and soldier, 
who withdrew from the world into a literary seclusion, 
may have reminded him of his own adventures. But 
an indifference to critical distinctions seems involved 
in the habitual reference to Cicero and to Lactantius, 
to Virgil and to Prudentius, as if these were names 
of precisely the same intrinsic value. It must be con- 
fessed, too, that it is annoying to feel that an orator 
who found such acute enjoyment in the verse of 
^schylus was prevented by a prejudice from finding 
it also in that of Shakespeare. 

It is perhaps connected with his critical insensibility, 
if it may so be called, that Jeremy Taylor, although 
he devotes so much attention to the classics, is singu- 
la: ly little affected by their principles in his grammar. 
His syntax is not founded, as is that of Sir Thomas 
Browne, on an obstinate preference for the Latin 
system. Taylor's ideas of grammatical composition 
were whimsical in the highest degree, and in the course 
of one of his long breathless sentences he will shift 
his tenses and link his noun to some neighbouring 
verb that shrinks, intimidated, from the unwelcome 
conjunction. The laxity of Taylor's grammar, so 
widely opposed to the elegant correctness of Dryden 
and Cowley, his younger contemporaries, has, however, 
not scandalised all his critics. Coleridge boldly defends 
it, and declares that if the syntax of Taylor is occasion- 
ally eccentric, it involves no difficulties of compre- 
hension. But even if we admit that "a man long 
accustomed to silent and solitary meditation is apt 
to lose or lessen the talent of communicating his 
thoughts with grace and perspicuity," the excuse 
hardly touches the question of Jeremy Taylor's grain - 
P 



226 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. 

mar ; since he is not accused of lack of grace, nor of 
any want of perspicuity save what directly arises from 
the fault which Mr. Saintsbury notes, that "he breaks 
Priscian's head with the calmest unconcern." 

The long sentences of Jeremy Taylor have, on the 
other hand, been unjustly blamed. In his finest 
writings the volume of the " stately march and diffi- 
cult evolutions" is mainly a matter of punctuation. 
Taylor's printers had an objection to the full stop, and 
they covered the page with commas and semicolons 
when a point was what they should have used. To 
repunctuate Taylor would be an act of real editorial 
kindness, and no author suffers more than he from that 
affectation which loves to reproduce in a modern book 
the irrational errors of an old printer. Another cause 
of the apparent length of Taylor's sentences is the 
rhetorical "and" with which he loves to link the 
independent sequents of them. It is a trick of oratory j 
by his conjunctions he thinks to hold the attention of 
the listener. If we leave out the needless "ands," 
mere inspirations of the breath, in reading, we find 
some of his longest sentences broken up into intelli- 
gible and completely effective modern prose. He was 
a conscious rhetorician, and in his most studied passages 
it is rather to the ear than to the eye that he appeals. 
His use of "Stay!" and "What 1 ?" and "Well!" as 
modes of opening a sentence, or cluster of sentences, 
is notable in this connection. 

The main quality of Taylor's style is its splendour, 
and the fact that he is extraordinarily florid and ornate 
has led to his being charged with artificiality. But 
although, as Coleridge has noted, Taylor's discursive 
intellect sometimes "dazzle-darkened his intuition," 



vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 227 

making him desire to say, at the same moment, and 
in prodigious language, more things than a human 
brain can endure in concert, his actual writing was 
rarely turgid or difficult. In that age great magni- 
ficence of imagery was easily excused for robing itself 
in pomposity of language. The Cypress Grove of Wil- 
liam Drummond had introduced a habit of excessively 
rich and sonorous prose, which developed, when it was 
abused, into mere tumidity. Taylor's meditations upon 
death are related, like those of Burnet, Browne, and 
Leighton, to this habit of superlative grandiloquence. 
But he never allows himself to lose his balance. He re- 
deems his emotion, at the most critical moment, by some 
phrase of extreme simplicity. In this tact of his, and 
in the command he never loses over his wealth of meta- 
phors and chains of sonorous polysyllables, he again 
constantly reminds the reader of Shakespeare. At the 
close of one of his most perilous outbursts of mortuary 
splendour, his voice drops into a whisper : "She lived 
as we all should live, and she died — as I fain would 
die." These sudden, pathetic felicities are always at 
his command. They greatly add to the charm of one 
of the most elaborate of the sections of his work, his 
beautifully constructed biographical funeral sermons. 

As a rule the vocabulary of Taylor is easy and 
modern. He clung less than most of his contem- 
poraries to obsolete forms of speech, and his genius 
naturally predisposed him to an easy elegance in the 
choice of words. By the side of Milton, for instance, 
whose curious vocabulary in prose seems sometimes 
almost affected in its oddity, Taylor appears of a newer 
fashion, less eccentric, anxious to avoid what is 
grotesque. Taylor would not have been a child of 



228 JEREMY TAYLOR [chap. vii. 

the late Renaissance, if be had not justified his right 
to impose certain words on the vernacular. He has 
a few favourite locutions of his own, and the close 
reader of his books soon comes to recognise lipothymy, 
eutaxy, dyscrasy, coloquintida, and discalceate as old friends. 
All these have preserved their place in our dictionaries, 
and although none of them is in common use to-day, 
they must pass as English words. We do not find 
in the pages of Jeremy Taylor those newfangled 
terms of pedantry which, all unacceptable and un- 
accepted, were urged in vain by his contemporaries 
on the unwilling English grammarians, and dropped 
immediately into oblivion. 



INDEX 



Adair, Patrick, 155, 159, 161, 180. 

^Eschylus, 74, 225. 

Airs and Dialogues (Lawes), 127. 

Anacreon, 86. 

Anthology, The Greek, 103. 

Apology for Liturgy, An, 1, 21, 38. 

"Apples of Sodom " (sermon), 103. 

Arcades (Milton), 127. 

Areop^gitica (Milton), 45. 

Arnatild of Port-Royal, 111, 209. 

Auxiliary Beauty, 129-33. 

B 

; Bacon, 211, 212. 
Barlow, Bishop, 124. 
Barrow, 214. 
Batchcroft, Thomas, 6. 
Bayly, Dr. Thomas, 53. 
Bellay, Joachim du, 93. 
Blood, Colonel Thomas, 196. 
Bloody Tenet of Persecution, The 

(Williams), 44. 
Boileau, 209. 
Bossnet, 81, 84, 104, 214. 
Boyle, Robert, 129. 
Bramhall, Archbishop, 160, 167, 

175, 198, 199. 
Bramhall, Archbishop, Funeral 

Sermon on, 198, 199. 
Bridges, Joanna, see Taylor, Joanna. 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 92, 164, 198, 

218, 225, 227. 



Burnet, Bishop, 227. 
Burton. 222, 224. 



Caius College, Cambridge, 5. 
Carbery, Richard, Earl of, 32, 33, 

34, 35, 51, 72, 95, 98, 117, 118, 

127. 

Frances, Countess of, 75-78. 

Carte, Thomas, 168. 

Casimir's Odes, 93. 

Catullus, 86. 

Charles I., 24, 25, 48, 50, 51, 63, 64, 

109, 126, 145. 

it., 145,161,203. 

Chillingworth, William, 14, 15, 16, 

30, 40, 57, 111, 215. 
Choice Forms of Prayer, 97. 
"Christian Simplicity" (sermon), 

103. 
Christian's Obligation to Peace and 

Charity, The (Hammond), 49. 
Cicero, 225. 

Cicero's Be Officiis, 103. 
Civil War, The, 24 seq. 
Clara, Franciscus a Sancta, 13, 14, 

18, 19. 
Clerus Domini, 95-97. 
Coleridge, S. T., 49, 50, 201, 211, 

213, 220, 225, 226. 
Compton, Spencer, second Earl of 

Northampton, 27, 28, 54, 55, 56, 

60. 
Comus (Milton), 45, 127. 



p2 



230 



JEREMY TAYLOR 



Conway, Edward, third Viscount, 
148, 149, 150, 153, 157, 206, 20S. 

Lady, 192, 194. 

Cornwallis, SirWilliam's, Essays, 74. 

Cowley, 114, 225. 

Crashaw, 7. 

Cromwell, Oliver, 51, 52, 108, 112, 
128, 150, 151, 156. 

Cromwell, Henry, 151, 156. 

Cudworth, 215. 

Cypress Grove, The (William 
Drummond), 227. 

D 

" Danses Macabres," 90. 
Dalstone, Sir George, 146. 
Davenport, Christopher, see Clara. 
Death, Conception of, in Jeremy 

Taylor's time, 90. 
Defoe, 193. 

Deiis Justijicatus, 125, 134, 136. 
Devonshire, Christiana, Countess of, 

125, 132, 133. 
Discourse of Friendship, The, 130, 

138, 139, 140-44. 
Dissuasion from Popery, 193, 200, 

201. 
Donne, John, 8, 91, 125, 163, 215. 
"Doomsday-Book" (sermons), 101. 
Dromore, 184-210. 
Dryden, 225. 
Ductor Dubitantium, 16, 119, 120, 

121, 123, 145, 157, 161-67. 
Dugdale, Sir William, 2, 87. 
Duppa, Bishop Brian, 98, 117, 119, 

120, 121, 122, 123. 

E 
Earle's Microcosmographie, 224. 
Egerton, Lady Alice, 127. 
Eikon Basilike, 65. 
Eniautos, 79-86, 95, 99, 102. 
Episcopacy Asserted, 26, 27. 
Euphues (Lily), 219. 
Euripides, 103. 



Evelyn, John, 107-109, 112, 114, 
117, 119, 127, 128, 133, 137, 138, 
145, 187, 188. 



' ' Faith and Patience of the Saints, 

The " (sermon), 83. 
Fenelon, 214, 217. 
Festival Hymns, 113-16. 
Flatman, 115. 
Free Disputation against pretended 

Liberty of Conscience (Ruther- 
ford), 49. 
Friendship, 140-44. 
Fuller, 7, 30, 44, 109, 215, 216. 
Funeral Monuments (John 

Weever), 93. 
Funeral Sermons, Taylor's, 77, 146, 

227. 
Funerals, Taylor's attitude to, 91, 

92. 

G 
Gardiner, Samuel R., 40, 44. 
Gerard, Colonel, 31, 32, 35. 
Ghosts, Belief in, 190-94. 
Golden Grove, 66-105. 
Golden Grove, The, 111, 112, 113, 

118. 
Gordon, Mr. Alexander, 201. 
Gray, 219. 

Greatrakes, Valentine, 206. 
Great Exemplar, The, 53-65, 127. 
Gunpowder Plot, Sermon on, 18, 

19, 59. 

H 
Hall, Joseph, 3, 215. 
Hammond, Bishop, 48, 49, 124, 137. 
Harrison, Dr. Thomas, 151. 
Hatton, Christopher, Lord, 25, 26, 

29, 63, 95, 187. 
Hausted, Peter, 16, 17. 
Heber, Bishop, 1, 27, 62, 85, 184. 
Hecuba (Euripides), 103. 
Henson, Canon Hensley, 41. 



INDEX 



231 



Herbert, George, 7, 64, 114. 

Hill, Colonel Arthur, 157, 176, 177, 

204, 206. 
Hill, Moses, 206. 
Hillsborough 176, 177, 178, 206. 
Hippolytus (pseudo-Seneca), 93. 
Holy Dying, 87, 88 seq. t 95. 
Holy Living, 69-75, 95. 
Homra House, 177. 
Hooker, 163. 
Horace, 93. 

I 
Ichabod (Ken), 197. 
Imitation of Christ, The, 113. 

J 

Jeanes, Henry, 136, 137. 

Jones, Inigo, 148, 153. 

Juxon, Bishop, 10, 17, 22, 64, 65. 

K 

Ken, Bishop, 197. 

Kennedy, Sir Kichard, 201, 202. 

Kennett, Bishop, 130. 

L 

Lactantius, 225. 

Langsdale, Edward, 134. 

Mrs. (Taylor's mother-in-law), 

134. 
Laud, Archbishop, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 

14, 16, 17, 21, 22, 31. 
Laugharne, Colonel, 31, 32, 33, 34, 

51. 
Lawes, Henry, 127. 
Leighton, Robert, 227. 
Leslie, Henry, Bishop, 160, 175, 182. 

Robert, Bishop, 175, 185. 

Lett, Canon, 177. 

Letter of Resolution (Hammond), 49. 

Liberty of Prophesying, The, 7, 33, 

40-50, 203, 218. 
Liberty of Conscience (Anon.), 44. 
Lisburn, 148, 149, 151, 177, 178. 
Llantihangel-Aberbythych, 36, 67, 

68, 86, 118. 



Lombard, Peter, 88. 

Londonderry, Marquis of, 178. 

Lort, Michael, 203. 

Louis xiv., 104. 

Lucan, 93. 

Lucretius, 93. 

Lyly, 219. 

M 
Margetson, Archbishop, 168, 198. 
"Marriage Ring, The" (sermon), 

102, 103. 
Martial, 74, 86, 223. 
Mason, William, 219. 
Massereene, John, first Viscount, 

155, 173, 202. 
Massillon, 80. 

Micro cosmographie (Earle), 224. 
Milton, 3, 7, 45, 49, 50, 127, 211, 

212, 227. 
Monk, General, 160. 
More, Henry, 7, 215. 
Musophilus (Samuel Daniel), 22. 

N 
Nicholson, Dr. Richard, 35. 
Northampton, Earl of, seeCompton. 
Novels, French heroic, 61, 142. 

O 

Orange, Princess Mary of, 170, 171. 
Original Righteousness (Henry 

Jeanes), 137. 
Original Sin, 120, 123, 124. 
" Orinda," see Philips, Mrs. 
Ormonde, James, first Duke of, 

167, 173, 174, 196, 197, 201. 
Osborne, Dorothy, 61. 
Ovid, 93. 
Oxford, 11-15, 18, 25-28. 

P 

Panzani, 19. 

Pearson, 214. 

Perse, Dr. Stephen, 4, 5. 

School, 4, 5. 

Persius, 93. 



232 



JEREMY TAYLOR 



Petty, Sir William, 152, 204. 

Petronius, 86, 93. 

Philips, Mrs. ("The Matchless 

Orinda"), 115, 137, 138, 139, 140, 

142, 143, 144, 145. 
Pindarique Odes (Cowley), 114. 
Pococke, 85. 
Portmore, 148-83, 194. 
Presbyterianism in Ireland, 156-61, 

173-75, 178-81. 
Prudentius, 224, 225. 
Psalter of David, The, Hatton's, 29. 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica(Sir Thomas 

Browne), 164. 
Puritanism, 22. 

R 

Raleigh, 91. 

Real Presence of Christ in the 

Blessed Sacrament, The, 98, 109, 

110, 111. 
Religion of a Protestant (Chilling- 
worth), 40. 
Repentance, Deathbed, 75, 82, 120, 

123, 124. 
Resolutions and Decisions (Joseph 

Hall), 163. 
Reverence due to the Altar, 38. 
Restoration, The, 160, 161, 187. 
Risden, Thomas, 8. 
Rome, Church of, 110, 146, 170, 

200, 201. 
Royston, Richard (publisher), 37, 

38, 107, 120, 122, 125, 129, 131, 

145, 161, 162, 169. 
Ruskin, 219. 
Rust, Bishop George, 5, 9, 12, 35, 

97, 160, 182, 183, 185, 193, 196, 

207, 209, 210. 
Rutland, Countess of, 147. 

S 
Saintsbury, Professor, 216, 226. 
Samwayes, Dr. Peter, 124. 
Sancroft, Bishop, 124. 
Sanderson, Bishop, 124, 163. 



Sarjeaunt, John, 110. 

Secrets of the Invisible World (Defoe), 

193. 
Sermon on Gunpoioder Treason, 19. 
Sermons preached at Golden Grove, 

79 seq. 
Shakespeare, 211, 212, 219, 222, 

225, 227. 
Sheldon, Gilbert, 12, 98, 110, 125, 

126, 128, 202. 
Silex Scintillans (Henry Vaughan), 

114, 115. 
Sin, Original, 120, 123, 124. 
Sonnets (Shakespeare), 55. 
"Spirit of Grace, The" (sermon), 

86. 
Statius, 223. 
Sterne, Dr. John, 152. 



Taylor, Jeremy : — 
Family history, 1-3. 
Birth, 3. 

Enters the Perse School, 4. 
Goes to Gonville and Caius College, 

4-6. 
Contemporaries at the University, 

7. 
Takes Holy Orders, 8. 
Preaches at St. Paul's, 8. 
Patronised by Laud, 9. 
Goes to All Souls, Oxford, 12. 
Chaplain to Laud, 13. 
Acquaintances at Oxford, 13-16. 
Rector of Uppingham, 17. 
Supposed Roman tendencies, 18 

seq. 
Sermon on Gunpowder Treason, 

18, 19. 
Marries Phoebe Langsdale, 20. 
His children, 21, 86, 186, 206, 207. 
Fall of his patron Laud, 21, 22. 
His part in the Civil War, 23 seq. 
Friendship with Sir Christopher 

Hatton, 25. 



INDEX 



233 



Taylor, Jeremy : — 
Episcopacy Asserted, 26, 27. 
Hector of Overstone, 27-29. 
Captured by the Parliamen- 
tarians, 31. 
Chaplain to Lord Carbery, 36. 
Literary work at Golden Grove, 

38 seq. 
An Apology for Liturgy, 38. 
The Liberty of Prophesying, 40. 
The Great Exemplar, 53. 
Life at Golden Grove, 66. 
Rule and Exercises of Holy 

Living, 69-75. 
Txoenty-Eight Sermons, 79-80. 
Death of Lady Carbery, 76. 
His orthodoxy suspected, 82, 120, 

123, 124, 125, 136. 
Death of his wife, 87. 
The Rides and Exercises of Holy 

Dying, 88-95. 
Citrus Domini, 95. 
Twenty-Five Sermons, 98-103. 
Years of affliction, 106-47. 
Friendship with John Evelyn, 107. 
The Real Presence of Christ in the 

Blessed Sacrament, 109. 
The Golden Grove, 112, 113. 
Suffers imprisonment, 112. 
Festival Hymns, 113-16. 
Unum Necessarium, 116-25. 
Again imprisoned, 116. 
Poverty, 117, 159. 
Second marriage, 117-18, 126-7. 
Deus JustifLcatus, 125. 
Retires to Man-dinam, 126. 
Reputed author of Auxiliary 

Beauty, 129-133. 
Family afflictions, 134-35. 
Leaves Wales, 135. 
Controversy with Henry Jeanes, 

136, 137. 
Brighter days, 137. 
His friendship with "Orinda," 

138 seq. 



Taylor, Jeremy: — 

A Discourse of the Nature and 
Offices of Friendship, 139-44. 

Goes to Portmore, 148. 

Chaplain to Lord Conway, 150. 

Friends and acquaintances in Ire- 
land, 149-53, 168. 

Persecuted by Presbyterian Party, 
156-59. 

Arrested and taken to Dublin, 158. 

Returns to London, 159. 

Ductor Dubitantium, 161-67. 

Welcomes Charles n., 161, 167. 

Nominated Bishop of Down and 
Connor, 167. 

His sternness as a Bishop, 156, 
159, 204. 

Vice - Chancellor of Trinity 
College, Dublin, 167. 

The Worthy Communicant, 169- 
72. 

Difficulties with the Presbyterian 
Clergy, 178-83, 196 seq., 201 
seq. 

Preaches at the opening of Parlia- 
ment, 189. 

Via Intelligentia:, 189. 

His labours in Ireland, 185-90. 

Funeral Sermon on Archbishop 
Bramhall, 198. 

Dissuasion from Popery, 200. 

His decline, 204. 

Death, 207. 

Jeremy Taylor as a father, 134 ; as 
a counsellor, 163, 166; as an 
orator, 188; his belief in ghosts, 
190 seq. ; interest in architec- 
ture, 205. 

His style, 43, 59, 60, 88, 93, 102, 
172 ; 217, 218 seq. ; originality, 
89 ; modernity of his mind, 90- 
92 ; popularity as a writer, 94, 
145 ; constant reference to the 
Classics, 74, 86, 93, 103, 222 
seq. ; verse writings, 114-16 ; 



234 



JEREMY TAYLOR 



Taylor, Jeremy : — 

position in English literature, 
105, 211-28; close observation of 
nature, 220-21 ; Coleridge's great 
admiration for his genius, 211, 
213, 225, 226 ; brilliancy as an 
artist, 212 ; compared with pre- 
ceding divines, 215 ; growth of 
his genius, 217; his best work, 
218; beauty of his writings, 213, 

218 ; their naturalness and sim- 
plicity, 219 ; purity of his taste, 

219 ; daring use of metaphors, 
219-20 ; laxity of his grammar, 
225 ; his vocabulary, 227-28. 

Dr Rowland, 1, 2. 

Nathaniel (father), 1, 2. 

Edmund (grandfather), 2, 3. 

Mary, nee Dean (mother), 3. 

Phoebe, nee Langsdale (wife), 

20, 21, 86, 87. 

William (son), 86. 

Edward (son), 186. 

Charles (son), 206, 207. 

Joanna, nee Bridges (2nd wife), 

117. 118, 126, 186. 
Thanatologia (Dr. John Sterne), 153. 
Theocritus, 142. 
Theognis, 142. 
Theological literature of the 17th 

century, 214. 
Thurland, Sir Edward, 128,133, 188. 
Tillotson, 214. 

Topica Sacra (Harrison), 151. 
Treves, Sir Frederic, 92, 93. 
Trinity College, Dublin, 167-69. 



Twenty -Eight Sermons, 79 seq., 99. 
Twenty-Five Sermons, 98, 99, 101. 

U 
Unum Necessarium, 116, 117, 122, 

123, 124. 
Uppingham, 16-24. 
Urn-Burial (Sir Thomas Browne), 

198. 

V 
Vane, Sir Harry, 21. 
Vaughan, Henry, 114, 115. 
Vaughan, Richard, see Carbery. 
Via lntellig entice, 189. 
Vigny, Alfred de, 105. 
Virgil, 225. 
Virginity, 74. 
Vita Jem Christi (Ludolphus of 

Saxony), 62. 

W 
Waller, 125. 
Ware, Sir James, 3. 
Warner, Bishop John, 109, 117, 

120, 125, 126. 
Wedderburn, Sir John, 145. 
Weeke, Andrew, 148, 149. 
-Wilkins, John, 129. 
William in. , 171. 
Witchcraft, 74. 
Wood, Anthony a, 13, 18, 83, 130, 

145. 
Worthy Communicant, TJie, 169-72, 

218, 223. 
Wray, Lady, 1, 2, 126. 
Wyatt, William, 35. 



P.inted by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
at the Edinburgh University Press 



JEngitsb f!Den of Xetters* 

NEW SERIES. 

Crown Svo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each. 

GEORGE ELIOT. By Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B. 

HAZLITT. By Augustine Birrell, K.C. 

MATTHEW ARNOLD. By Herbert W. Paul. 

RUSKIN. By Frederic Harrison. 

TENNYSON. By Sir Alfred Lyall. 

RICHARDSON. By Austin Dobson. 

BROWNING. By G. K. Chesterton. 

CRABBE. By Alfred Ainger. 

FANNY BURNEY. By Austin Dobson. 

JEREMY TAYLOR. By Edmund Gosse. 

JANE AUSTEN. By the Rev. Canon Beeching. 

HOBBES. By Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B. 

ADAM SMITH. By Francis W. Hirst. 

SYDNEY SMITH. By George W. E. Russell. 

ANDREW MARVELL. By Augustine Birrell, K.C. 

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. By A. C. Benson. 

MARIA EDGEWORTH. By the Hon. Emily 
Lawless. 

MRS. GASKELL. By Clement Shorter. 

THOMAS MOORE. By Stephen Gwynn. 

CHARLES KINGSLEY. By G. K. Chesterton. 



GEORGE ELIOT 

By Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B. 

Mr. Herbert Paul in the NINETEENTH CENTURY— "The first of 
English living critics has been fitly chosen to inaugurate the new series of Messrs. 
Macmillan's 'English Men of Letters.' Mr. Leslie Stephen's 'George Eliot' is a 
grave, sober, and measured estimate of a great Englishwoman." 

Mr. W. L. Courtney in the DAILY TELEGRAPH.— " One of the most 
fascinating and accomplished pieces of criticism that have appeared for some time 
past. Mr. Stephen is a prince of contemporary critics, and any one who ventures to 
disagree with him incurs a very heavy responsibility." 

ST. /AMES'S GAZETTE.— " Written with the greatest literary charm, and 
with a faculty for keen criticism that is not dulled by any extreme of opinion." 

GUARDIAN. — " Has all Mr. Stephen's ease, his humour, his reasonableness, his 
acuteness of analysis, his impartiality of judgment." 

WILLIAM HAZLITT 

By Augustine Birrell. 

ACADEMY. — "We have read this book through in a single sitting, delighted by 
its easy yet careful narrative, its sane and kindly comment, and last, not least, by its 
wealth of quotation." 

DAILY NEIVS. — " Mr. Birrell has made judicious use of the mass of materials 
at his disposal, and with the aid of his acute and thoughtful running commentary, has 
enabled his readers to form a tolerably accurate and complete conception of the 
brilliant essayist and critic with no greater expenditure of time and pains than is 
needed for the perusal of this slender volume." 

BRITISH WEEKLY.—" Loth the writer of this volume and its subject lend it 
an interest and a value such as attach to the best in this fine series." 

MATTHEW ARNOLD 

By Herbert W. Paul. 

Canon Ainger in the PILOT.— ■" A most interesting and admirably written 
estimate of Matthew Arnold. This estimate, so far as regards Mr. Arnold's poetry 
and his prose critical essays, seems to me so nearly faultless as hardly to justify any 
counter criticism." 

WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.—" An exceedingly effective essay in criticism." 
SPECTA TOR. — " This monograph is valuable as a succinct statement, set out in 
an appreciative, interesting, skilful, and sometimes sparkling fashion, of the labours 
and pursuits that make up the tireless life of the great poet and essayist." 



JOHN RUSKIN 

By Frederic Harrison. 



TIMES.—" Mr. Harrison knew Ruskin at his best ; lectured with him at the 
Working Men's College ; visited him at Denmark Hill ; and in later years often saw 
and corresponded with him. The result is a study of the writer marked in equal 
measure by discrimination and sympathy; and a picture of the man, vivid and 
arresting." 

GLOBE. — "The best account of Ruskin and his work which has yet been given 
to the world. The writer is sure of his facts, and is able to illuminate them by means 
not only of a close personal acquaintance with his subject, but also of a wide and deep 
knowledge of many other men and things." 

DAILY TELEGRAPH— "The fourth of the new series of ' English Men of 
Letters,' which, with the volumes yet to come, ought to form one of the most interest- 
ing of literary judgments passed by the present generation on the great masters of 
English literature." 



TENNYSON 

By Sir Alfred LYALL, K.C.B. 

TIMES. — " The criticism is always sane, and sometimes brilliant ; it never errs on 
the side of exuberance ; and it is expressed in excellent English, moulded into dignified 
paragraphs." 

DAILY ^ TELEGRAPH. — "The memoir is admirably earned out, telling the 
reader precisely what he wants to know, giving an account of what the poems contain, 
as well as a running commentary upon their character and value, being written, in 
short, not for the superior person, but for the average man of the world with literary 
tastes." 

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 

By Austin Dobson. 

TIMES. — "Mr. Austin Dobson has written what is very nearly a perfect little 
book of its kind. . . . Mr. Dobson's book is composed with infinite literary tact, with 
precision, and a certain smiling grace, and friendly and easy touch, at once remark- 
able and charming. Mr. Dobson is always accurate in his facts. He is fresh, 
vivacious, and interesting in his conclusions." 

Mr. W. L._ Courtney in the DAILY TELEGRAPH.— " Mr. Dobson's study 
is absolutely in the first rank, worthy to be put by the side of Sir Leslie Stephen's 
criticism of George Eliot." 

WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.—" We have nothing but praise to utter of Mr. 
Dobson's contribution to ' English Men of Letters.'" 

BROWNING 

By G. K. Chesterton. 

TIMES. — " The originality and suggestiveness of Mr. Chesterton's work . . 
his sanity and virility of temper are evident and refreshing." 

Mr. W. L. Courtney in the DAILY TELEGRAPH.— "One of the most 
illuminating and stimulating pieces of work which have been produced in our not 
wholly critical age." 

A THENMUM.—" This new volume of the ' English Men of Letters ' is one of 
the most refreshing in that admirable series." 

PILOT. — " An interesting, entertaining, and even inspiring life of a great poet." 

CRABBE 

By Alfred Ainger. 

TIMES.—" Canon Ainger has given us the book we should expect from him, one 
full of sincerity, good taste, and good sense. The story of the poet's uneventful life 
is admirably retold, with the quiet distinction of a style which is intent on its own 
business and too sure of producing its effect to care about forcing attention by 
rhetorical or epigrammatic fireworks. And Canon Ainger has been fortunate enough 
to be able to add a few new facts, and throw a little new light on the poet's life." 

GLOBE. — " Unquestionably, and even obviously, this volume by Canon Ainger is 
the best available account of Crabbe and his works. The treatment is careful, 
thorough, and, while sympathetic, shrewd." 

DAILY NEWS.—" Admirably done. . . . The first adequate biography of 
Crabbe that has yet appeared." 

FANNY BURNEY 

By Austin Dobson. 

TIMES. — " A book of unfailing charm — perhaps the most charming of this 
admirable series." 

GLOBE. — " Eloquent and sparkling." 



English flfcen of lletters. 

Edited by JOHN MORLEY. 

RE-ISSUE OF THE ORIGINAL SERIES. 

Library Edition. Uniform with the New Series. 

Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each. 



ADDISON. 

By W. J. COURTHOPE. 

BACON. 

By Dean Church. 
BENTLEY. 

By Sir Richard J ebb. 
BUNYAN. 

By J. A. Froude. 
BURKE. 

By JOHN MORLEY. 

BURNS. 

By Principal Shairp. 
BYRON. 

Bv Professor NlCHOL. 
CARLYLE. 

By Professor NlCHOL. 
CHAUCER. 

By Dr. A. W. Ward. 
COLERIDGE. 

By H. D. Traill. 
COWPER. 

By Goldwin Smith. 
DEFOE. 

By W. Minto. 
DEQUINCEY. 

By Professor Masson. 
DICKENS. 

By Dr. A. W. Ward. 
DRYDEN. 

By Professor Saintsbury. 
FIELDING. 

By Austin Dobson. 
GIBBON. 

By J. C. Morison. 
GOLDSMITH, n Q Q 

By W. Black. \J O ^ 
GRAY. 

By Edmund Gosse. 
HAWTHORNE. 

By Henry James. 



HUME. 

By Professor Huxley, F.R.S. 
JOHNSON. 

By Sir Leslie Stephen, K. C. B. 
KEATS. 

By Sidney Colvin. 
LAMB, CHARLES. 

By Canon AlNGER. 
LANDOR. 

By Sidney Colvin. 
LOCKE. 

By Thomas Fowler. 
MACAU LAY. 

By J. C. Morison. 
MILTON. 

By Mark Pattison. 
POPE. 

By Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B. 
SCOTT. 

By R. H. Hutton. 
SHELLEY. 

By J. A. Symonds. 
SHERIDAN. 

By Mrs. Oliphant. 
SIDNEY. 

By J. A. Symonds. 
SOUTHEY. 

By Professor Dowden. 
SPENSER. 

By Dean Church. 
STERNE. 

BvjH. D. Traill. 
SWPFT. 

BySir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B. 
THACKERAY. 

By Anthony Trollope. 
WORDSWORTH. 

By F. W. H. Myers. 



MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON. 






_, 




































